perfidy

Here's a gem from Randall Robinson, link via marcland, who was kind enough to link us the other day, and has a good post on the Iran situation. (Follow the link to see the story.)

I saw that title, and knew instantly that it was written by ol' Ted Dalrymple, that polyanna prison doctor from Manchester.

A fun read, though, as always.

In this newhouse column, Lileks explains better than I can exactly what is wrong with John Kerry crowing about all the love he's getting from foriegn leaders.

"I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, 'You've got to win, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that," Kerry said in Florida.

...it's a telling remark. Sen. Kerry might be surprised to discover that foreign opinion doesn't concern your average NASCAR dad, who would prefer America to be strong and disliked than weak and beloved.

...On another level, though, Kerry's remark sounds pathetically naive. Why does he think the Unnamed Foreign Leaders like him best -- because they have America's best interests at heart? They want to mire the United States in the tarpit of the United Nations again, and Kerry looks like the man to wade right in.

The fact that Kerry would boast about this is almost beyond my comprehension. Why should we care what Chirac thinks about who occupies the office? And furthermore, why should we agree with his choice for us, given his behavior towards the US over the last couple years? Remarkable.

Plucked from Slate. Is Rove really going to want to get into a war of words?

"God loves you, and I love you. And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about their future can hear."—Los Angeles, Calif., March 3, 2004 (Thanks to Tanny Bear)

"The march to war affected the people's confidence. It's hard to make investment. See, if you're a small business owner or a large business owner and you're thinking about investing, you've got to be optimistic when you invest. Except when you're marching to war, it's not a very optimistic thought, is it? In other words, it's the opposite of optimistic when you're thinking you're going to war." —Springfield, Mo., Feb. 9, 2004 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.)

"See, one of the interesting things in the Oval Office—I love to bring people into the Oval Office—right around the corner from here—and say, this is where I office, but I want you to know the office is always bigger than the person."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"More Muslims have died at the hands of killers than—I say more Muslims—a lot of Muslims have died—I don't know the exact count—at Istanbul. Look at these different places around the world where there's been tremendous death and destruction because killers kill."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"In an economic recession, I'd rather that in order to get out of this recession, that the people be spending their money, not the government trying to figure out how to spend the people's money."—Tampa, Fla., Feb. 16, 2004

"King Abdullah of Jordan, the King of Morocco, I mean, there's a series of places—Qatar, Oman—I mean, places that are developing—Bahrain—they're all developing the habits of free societies."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004

A mentally ill woman in Utah has been charged with murder of one of her unborn twins after she refused her doctor's advice to deliver her twins via Caeserian section. One of the twins died of an apparent infection two days before she delivered naturally. The woman was warned repeatedly that in her case, an immediate Caesearian was the only guarantee that both her children would live, and she declined the procedure. There is a bunch of hearsay about what she said and did, and why she refused the C-section, but at this point, the facts is just what the facts is.

Look, I understand and respect the growing concern for the rights of the unborn in this country, even if I think this issue is waaay too complicated for the law to handle. But this case is particularly disturbing for a number of reasons.

First: multiple births are always risky, and the risk of miscarriage or stillbirth is much higher than with single-fetus pregnancies. How do the law and the health care system deal with the implications of a "guilty" verdict, which would set a precedent by which any woman who delivers a stillborn fetus could be charged with murder?

Second: in this country, doctors can only give advice-- they cannot mandate that people follow it. You can't force people to have surgery. Unfortunately, an unborn fetus cannot give consent, and I don't see how a government can presume to speak on behalf of the unborn in every case without compromising the rights of the parents, health care providers, etc. The thorny moral calculus aside, there's the dirty issues of patient insurance, liability insurance, tort law, the costs of health care, patient rights, and hospital rights. It's just too complicated a set of issues to be resolved ad hoc by a patchwork of legal rulings, and I seriously doubt that an omnibus bill speaking to this could do anything but make matters worse.

Third: are we going to charge women with child endangerment for having a beer during pregnancy? For skydiving? Smoking? Sleeping on their back? Eating shellfish? Where is the bright line?

Fourth: this case, like the Scott Peterson murder trial is yet another attempt to subvert Roe v. Wade, which is currently the law of the land, like it or not.

Yet again, the law is stepping into dangerous territory, dealing with moral issues it's ill-equipped to manage. I guess activism isn't confined to the left side of the aisle. I don't like the implications of this one bit, much less the utter freakiness of the whole situation.

[wik] Eugene Volokh, an actual lawyer, weighs in on the legal quandaries.

[alsø wik] For his next trick, Eugene Volokh quotes a reader, an actual OB/GYN on the matter.

Much has been made in the right wing press of a "liberal" focus on "Bush's lies". What, exactly, are we supposed to do when we have a clear-cut case of it right in the middle of extremely serious public debate?

Tony Pugh of Knight Ridder writes about the senior's drug benefit cost analysis process. The short version is that the real number, $550 Billion, was available from the Office of the Actuary well before the debate. The administration knew about this number, but squelched its release by threatening to fire the analyst who came up with the figure.

$400 Billion was bandied about extensively as the "cost" of the program. To their great dishonor, GOP and Dems voted for this boondoggle intergeneration wealth transfer, a giveaway to the drug industry. And I almost forgot; while they were voting an open-ended benefit to seniors, they also chopped off the government's hands by writing into law that they government may not negotiate on price with drug companies. Every other nation in the world that has a public drug plan negotiates, except this one.

But back to our saga...the country was shocked (to the extent that is possible any more) to learn, only two months after the drug benefit was signed into law, that its costs were off by nearly 50%. "How did this happen?", we all asked ourselves...and now we know.

I call it a lie when you deliberately falsify budget numbers to deceive congress, in order to get your way in the political process.

This is, of course, simply the tip of the iceberg. Knight-Ridder obtained copies of emails that prove that this incident occurred.

We've had years of bullshit job estimates from the Bush crowd. Do we have any reason to believe that these estimates originated anywhere else other than Karl Rove's head?

Belle and John have a fascinating brace of posts (part one, part two) on the huge, yawning chasm that stands between libertarian theory and practice.
Belle goes on the attack first, writing on the pony thesis of libertarian dreaming:

Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York and Tokyo, medieval tax-farmers, or a Lendu militia. (In general, if thoughts of the Eastern Congo intrude, I suggest waving them away with the invisible hand and repeating "that's anarcho-capitalism" several times.) Nothing's happening but a buzzing noise, right?

Now try it the wishful thinking way. Just wish that we might all live in a state of perfect liberty, free of taxation and intrusive government, and that we should all be wealthier as well as freer. Now wish that people should, despite that lack of any restraint on their actions such as might be formed by policemen, functioning law courts, the SEC, and so on, not spend all their time screwing each other in predictable ways ranging from ordinary rape, through the selling of fraudulent stocks in non-existent ventures, up to the wholesale dumping of mercury in the public water supplies. (I mean, the general stock of water from which people privately draw.) Awesome huh? But it gets better. Now wish that everyone had a pony. Don't thank me, Thank John.

John writes in the second part on the problems that occur when you can't, say, fire the police, much less summon them:

Finally, I know that libertarians are sick of hearing about the Wild West (or the eastern Congo), but if you propose a model of rights enforcement whose nearest analogue seems to be the Clint Eastwood movie "A Fistful of Dollars", then you just have to suck it up. It can hardly be irrelevant or illegitimate to point out that in our world, which my people call "Earth", there already exist places where people must band together for self-defense and form militia-like organizations for private rights enforcement. In all these places, some bastard gets in charge of it and starts treating everyone like shit. Quis custodiet, etc. How do I fire my private-rights enforcement group again?

It's important not to fetishize the right of self-defense out of all proportion. I could be as heavily armed as I like, but I have to sleep sometime, and if I'm home alone with my children and fifty armed guys show up, I'm still screwed. Personally, I'd like to be able to call 911 and have the cops show up (I figure I could hold even 50 guys off that long, with a defensible position and a sniper rifle). In the libertarian utopia, those guys outside would be the cops. I know that there are places in the world where the cops are the bad guys. But this is a problem which we know, empirically, can be fixed. It seems to me there are insuperable, structural difficulties in proposing that private organizations take over all the functions of the state, which have to do with human nature. People will be bastards if you give them a chance. Stipulating this feature away does not make for good political practice. See: communism, passim.

And that is why I blogrolled them. They got long knives and steady hands.

The Justice Department "is dropping its demand, at least for now, that six Planned Parenthood clinics around the country produce medical records on abortions, officials said Tuesday." This according to the New York Times. Thank God.

In their zeal to prosecute offenders under the new Partial Birth Abortion law, the Justice Department has stated that patients now have "no reasonable expectation" that their medical records may remain private, and goen ahead with wide-ranging subpoenas of individual patient records. Excuse me, what the fuck? Didn't the "Patients' Bill of Rights" pass in 2000, and with it a law protecting the privacy of medical records? Part of the very fabric of the doctor-patient relationship is based on the absolute confidentiality of what goes on.

And now that it's politicially convenient, the Patients' Bill of Rights is no good? Look, this is crazy. There are still subpoenas outstanding elsewhere demanding individual patient records. The bitter, rancorous debate over abortion notwithstanding, this is just crazy and has to stop.

[wik] William Safire opines.

[alsø wik] Now I remember! I first saw this on Kathy Kinsley's site! Yesterday was a bad, bad day for my brain.

Krugman gives us the picture that's worth a thousand words.

See the distance between the grey line and the black line? I have a name for that: The Credibility Gap.

When it comes to tax cuts, we know they're good for the GOP's political donors. They get the tax cuts (refunds provided by the social security fund, of course). What we've been told is that this is good for everyone, and results in a better situation for everyone. What we've been told is that these tax cuts would provide massive stimulation to the economy, which would result in more jobs.

Three years in a row Bush's economic team has predicted massive job gains because of tax cuts. They did this in spite of the fact that no serious economists agreed with them.

This leaves us with only two possibilities: Either Bush and friends are really piss-poor at predictions, or they're doing it deliberately. Are there other possibilities I haven't considered?

And let's dispense with the axis of 9/11-recession-war crap. All of that was known early to all parties, and Bush's team was the only one making these outlandish projections.

Left: "Earth is round."
Right: "Earth is flat."
Press: "Shape of Earth: Views differ."

Winds of Change's "Armed Liberal" has a thought-provoking post up on the topic, as related to electronic voting and the US on the world stage, that should be widely read. Although I disagree in part with his conclusions (the most important problem?), that doesn't mean I disagree with the underlying premise whatsoever.

Noted author, songwriter, raconteur, salsa merchant, barbecue chef, friend to transvestites, and all-around hero to Johno, Kinky Friedmanis running for Governer of Texas. That's right. The craziest Semite west of the Pecos, and genius behind the song "They Just Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore" is running for the same post that bred our currect pars-dent.

"I want to fight the wussification of the state of Texas. I want to rise and shine and bring back the glory of Texas," Friedman said. "I am a writer of fiction who tells the truth."

According to the Houston Chronicle,

"There are no skeletons in my closet. They are all bleaching on a beach somewhere," he said.

You want to know Kinky's stand on gun control?

"I do not carry a gun myself, so if someone is going to shoot me, they better remember to bring their own weapon."

On abortion?

"I am not pro-life, I am not pro-choice, I am pro football."

On the serious side, Kinky would like to establish a Texas Peace Corps where people could volunteer and help the state. He was a member of the Peace Corps in Borneo, where he taught agriculture to people who had been successfully farming for 2,000 years.

He would like to see nondenominational prayer in school and make Texas a state that does not allow animal shelters or pounds to kill abandoned or stray pets.

He has no plans to get a make-over for the campaign. He will smoke his cigars and wear his cowboy hat low over his curly hair.

"I got a straight perm a few months ago. It was so bad that it made me look like Hitler as a used car salesman," he said.

Let's all move to Texas, buy a shotgun, and cast a vote for Kinky!

This landed on Winds of Change. Maybe it's a bit clearer than the ones I've written before on the same topic.

Supply/demand charts don't mean a thing to people who don't have jobs. We're not particularly close to one of the historical lows for employment at the moment. Employment to population _is_ worrying low at the moment, and it seems to keep dropping.

Let's be clear on what's happened since trickle-down economics became popular. You can easily look up the studies for yourself on income and employment (Saenz and Piketty, IRS site, CBO site), but the gist of it is this: Since the late 70's, capital gains taxes have been cut in half, as have income taxes on the wealthiest 2% or so of the population. The line being force-fed to the public was that this would "stimulate" the economy and raise all boats with the tide. What has in fact happened?

Constant dollar income from 1972 to 2000 rose by 4%, if you are in the _bottom_ 99% of income earners. If you're in the top 1%, constant dollar income increased by over 500% (Saenz, Piketty). Furthermore, if you were in the 99% to 99.5% bracket, your income increased by about 40% (which weights the upper bracket even further).

Meanwhile, as we were dramatically cutting taxes on the wealthiest political donors, we _increased_ social security taxes, circa 1983. Why did we do this? To "save" the system, so it would have enough money to pay for baby boomer retirements, amongst other things. Note that because social security taxes cut off at 87k (today, somewhat less earlier), social security taxes fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class. Three quarters of Americans pay MORE in social security taxes than they do in income taxes.

Instead of setting aside the money, the geniuses in BOTH parties simply added it to the general fund and spent it, leaving a shiny IOU in place of the cash.

So poor and middle class people have been _overpaying_ into the social security fund. Where is the extra money going? Why, it was given to the highest income earners in the form of a tax cut! So we cut taxes on the wealthiest because there is a "surplus", and we pay for it by transferring money out of the social security silo, to balance the general fund's budget.

There is only ONE fair solution...if too much money is in the social security fund (and over the past 20 years there has been), GIVE IT BACK TO THE PEOPLE WHO PUT IT THERE. We call them the poor and middle class, in this country. Why on earth would we give THEIR RETIREMENT MONEY (and YOURS) to the highest income individuals?

Our "conservative" friends tell us that by letting top income earners avoid taxes, we somehow stimulate the economy. Exactly how much "stimulation" does the economy need to undergo to make up for the MASSIVE THEFT of retirement savings from the poor and middle class.

Go figure out for yourself...the general fund has borrowed over $1.8 trillion from social security. What part of that did YOU contribute? Would you be better off with that in your retirement account, or are you better off with trickle-down BS and tax avoidance schemes for the wealthy?

I think the election is all about the economy, and all about ethical fiscal management of public resources. There are a lot of folks who orbit this blog who'd want to say it's about security. I agree, but security has both a long term and a short term. Short term is military, and is not really all that much of an issue. The course has been set, and a President of either party isn't going to vary too much. Longer term we need a solid economy to _sustain_ that security. Taxes as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest levels (around 15%, down from 19.5% recently) since the 1950s. What, YOUR taxes are way higher than that? You're right. They are; you pay way too much in tax, between federal income, social security, and medicare. The reason you pay way too much is that there are others who don't pay their share.

Guess it's not hard to figure out which side of this I'm on. But here's the thing: Exactly what does Kerry have to say about this situation? So far...nothing substantive. Hopefully it'll come. Bush's policies have clearly favored the same failed trickle-down policies we've been suffering under for the past twenty years.

We have two decades that shows us that the effect of cutting taxes on the the wealthiest of Americans has the effect of...reducing how much tax they pay.

This essential flaw has been masked by steadily increasing and incomprehensible public debts. Out of sight, out of mind...

Yesterday was the Massachusetts Democratic Primary, in which resident dirtbag John Kerry stomped the opposition like Warren Sapp playing pee-wee league. Although I am unimpressed with Kerry (call it anti-impressed; null-impressed; I got my hate on) as a candidate, a person, and a user of valuable oxygen, I have been deeply impressed by the efforts of another Democratic contender: Dennis Kucinich.

Now, I know what you'll say. "He's crazy! He's incompetent! He'll get us all killed! Have you ever been to Cleveland?" And yes, he's all that and a box of hammers, and Cleveland was a stink-pit for a while there thanks to him, but consider this. In the weeks before the Primary, only one candidate's supporters were out stumping in my district. Only one candidate's supporters were flyering, signing, speechifying, and pressing the flesh. Only one candidate's supporters took the time to personally hand me a flyer and ask if I had any questions-- and then proceeded to answer questions. Only one candidate's supporters wrote my wife (a registered Dem) a very nice and poorly-spelled personal letter making a case for his campaign and asking for her vote. Guess who.

He might be crazy, but his organization cares enough to keep trying for the sake of their message. He might be incompetent, but of all the men running for President, Dennis Kucinich is the only one who has the courage to stick to his insane, dangerously radical convictions. He's got integrity.

Why's he the only one?

The Village Voice is reporting that John Kerry did some very, very bad things when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./ M.I.A. Affairs in the early nineties. The POW issue has been a contentious one since the end of the Vietnam War. Many people are convinced that the government in general, and the DoD in particular have acted to cover up evidence that the Vietnamese still had living American prisoners. And there is a lot of evidence to support that contention. The general apathy of a public eager to 'move on' and put painful memories behind them has contributed to an atmosphere where this is possible.

But this article makes the claim that Kerry actively participated in these activities when he was chair of the select committee.

In the committee's early days, Kerry had given encouraging indications of being a committed investigator. He said he had "leads" to the existence of P.O.W.'s still in captivity. He said the number of these likely survivors was more than 100 and that this was the minimum. But in a very short time, he stopped saying such things and morphed his role into one of full alliance with the executive branch, the Pentagon, and other Washington hierarchies, joining their long-running effort to obscure and deny that a significant number of live American prisoners had not been returned. As many as 700 withheld P.O.W.'s were cited in credible intelligence documents, including a speech by a senior North Vietnamese general that was discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar.

Here are details of a few of the specific steps Kerry took to hide evidence about these P.O.W.'s.

• He gave orders to his committee staff to shred crucial intelligence documents. The shredding stopped only when some intelligence staffers staged a protest. Some wrote internal memos calling for a criminal investigation. One such memo—from John F. McCreary, a lawyer and staff intelligence analyst—reported that the committee's chief counsel, J. William Codinha, a longtime Kerry friend, "ridiculed the staff members" and said, "Who's the injured party?" When staffers cited "the 2,494 families of the unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen, among others," the McCreary memo continued, Codinha said: "Who's going to tell them? It's classified."

  Kerry defended the shredding by saying the documents weren't originals, only copies—but the staff's fear was that with the destruction of the copies, the information would never get into the public domain, which it didn't. Kerry had promised the staff that all documents acquired and prepared by the committee would be turned over to the National Archives at the committee's expiration. This didn't happen. Both the staff and independent researchers reported that many critical documents were withheld.

• Another protest memo from the staff reported: "An internal Department of Defense Memorandum identifies Frances Zwenig [Kerry's staff director] as the conduit to the Department of Defense for the acquisition of sensitive and restricted information from this Committee . . . lines of investigation have been seriously compromised by leaks" to the Pentagon and "other agencies of the executive branch." It also said the Zwenig leaks were "endangering the lives and livelihood of two witnesses."
• A number of staffers became increasingly upset about Kerry's close relationship with the Department of Defense, which was supposed to be under examination. (Dick Cheney was then defense secretary.) It had become clear that Kerry, Zwenig, and others close to the chairman, such as Senator John McCain of Arizona, a dominant committee member, had gotten cozy with the officials and agencies supposedly being probed for obscuring P.O.W. information over the years. Committee hearings, for example, were being orchestrated to suit the examinees, who were receiving lists of potential questions in advance. Another internal memo from the period, by a staffer who requested anonymity, said: "Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating."
• The Kerry investigative technique was equally soft in many other critical ways. He rejected all suggestions that the committee require former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to testify. All were in the Oval Office during the Vietnam era and its aftermath. They had information critical to the committee, for each president was carefully and regularly briefed by his national security adviser and others about P.O.W. developments. It was a huge issue at that time.
• Kerry also refused to subpoena the Nixon office tapes (yes, the Watergate tapes) from the early months of 1973 when the P.O.W.'s were an intense subject because of the peace talks and the prisoner return that followed. (Nixon had rejected committee requests to provide the tapes voluntarily.) Information had seeped out for years that during the Paris talks and afterward, Nixon had been briefed in detail by then national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and others about the existence of P.O.W.'s whom Hanoi was not admitting to. Nixon, distracted by Watergate, apparently decided it was crucial to get out of the Vietnam mess immediately, even if it cost those lives. Maybe he thought there would be other chances down the road to bring these men back. So he approved the peace treaty and on March 29, 1973, the day the last of the 591 acknowledged prisoners were released in Hanoi, Nixon announced on national television: "All of our American P.O.W.'s are on their way home."

...A year after he issued the committee report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate, Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed in abandoned P.O.W.'s were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here."

If this is true, and it seems plausible, then there we have another very big reason not to like Kerry. [Hat tip: Dad.]

This whole gay marriage thing reminds me of the original women's suffrage debate all the way back in the 1850's. (Yes, the 1850's. Now, ask yourself why the 14th and 15th Amendments, passed after the Civil War, specify "male[s]" as citizens and voters.)

In particular, a great quote comes to mind. Judge Hurlbut of Massachusetts wrote to Susan B. Anthony in the early '50s on the question of why women couldn't be allowed to vote: "[y]ou have the argument, but custom and prejudice are against you, and they are stronger than truth and logic."

Despite the Boston Globe's ongoing love affair with John Kerry, I just can't bring myself to like him.

A portion of those similarly displeased with Kerry take issue with his post-war shenanigans. His brief career as a hippy is enough to turn that portion off. Others are suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his decorations, earned under fire (so the stories go), yet thrown away in a fit of highly visible faux disgust a short time later. Except they weren't his, as we know, and the real ones are now resting comfortably carefully framed and displayed in his office. I consider these parts of Kerry history as poor form, but they're not enough not to vote for him, 30 years on.

There are many more substantive reasons that I would be reluctant to vote for the man.
As a resident of a perpetually impoverished region of Massachusetts, I am intimately familiar with the utter lack of effort on the part of Kerry and his mistress, Ted Kennedy, to improve this part of the world. Now, if you live here it can be kinda funny how self-centered Bostonians can be- the punchline of course is that the state is so ridiculously small. But it's not that funny when the people who run the place actually live that way. Matter of fact, alot of people on Beacon Hill aren't even clear where New York starts; Ted even believes that the NY border runs near Springfield (heard him say it with my own ears). So those of us in western MA, who have seen little real growth here in my lifetime, would ask Mr. Kerry how, if he can't improve an economy on the scale of western Massachusetts, and he's been on the job for about 22 years, how he can claim to have an effective policy for improving the national economy within 4 years? That might sound good on TV, but here we know better.

The economy, though, is not a major concern of mine and does not influence my voting decision. Unlike Ross, I am convinced that I will never have the $$ I think I deserve, regardless of who's President. I'll just continue to work 2-3 jobs until I die, and that's that.

More to follow.

From the comments section of this post from Jane Galt, we find this fascinating article from the July, 1926 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

The chaos that ensued is a bit of a cautionary tale. (And yes, I am aware of the differences between the Soviet Union of the mid twenties and our current utopian paradise in America.) Read the whole thing, as they say. Some of the consequences of Communist efforts to make the New Soviet Man (and Woman) prefigure the results of the introduction of the Pill and the Sexual Revolution.

I also found interesting this bit from Jane's post:

And people who were cheering the various court decisions, and are now screaming about this, need a consistency check. Yes, we all support gay marriage -- but a majority of your fellow citizens don't. You thought you'd found a way to end run the tedious process of cultural change by getting judges or officials who lean your way to read rights you're in favor of into the constitution. You can hardly scream "foul" when they try to get legislators who don't lean your way to write those rights right back out again.

This gets to some of what I was saying - that from the conservative point of view, liberal judicial activism leaves them no recourse but quixotic attempts to pass constitutional amendments because no matter how many legislative battles they win, liberals can always find an agreeable judge.

A panel of Federal judges have ruled that the Massachusetts legislature must redraw the tortuous and insane boundaries of certain Boston-area voting districts.

A panel of federal judges ordered Massachusetts House leaders yesterday to redraw the Boston legislative map, determining that the plan crafted by House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran and his lieutenants was designed to protect their own political futures at the expense of black voters' constitutional rights. . . .

During the trial last fall, Finneran, a Mattapan Democrat, insisted that the redistricting plan did not unfairly divide minority neighborhoods, but he conceded that his aides tried to ensure that sitting representatives were not harmed by shifting demographics revealed by a new census.

When the lines were redrawn, [House leader Tom] Finneran's district shed three overwhelmingly minority neighborhoods and took on three that were at least 95 percent white, including areas of Milton. Even as Boston for the first time emerged as a "majority-minority" city in the 2000 federal census, Finneran's district went from 74 percent minority to 61 percent minority.

"The House was comfortable with manipulating district lines," the court ruled. "This sad fact speaks to the totality of the circumstances."

More of this, please!

Who inherits the FMA? The youth of this country. Overwhelmingly, younger citizens have indicated that they DO NOT CARE about sexual preference and gay marriage. What we have here is a last putrid outgassing from corpse of morality in this White House. The stench will linger over OUR generation, once these fools are gone.

The Rove Republicans will sell out the gay population and the youth of this country to retain power, by appealing to discrimination...by finding a way to redirect anger and frustration into an old, familiar pattern to blame and hatred...

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy is writing about my personal favorite Amendment, the 9th (tied with the 10th). There seems to be a debate swirling among webloggers about its meaning and applicability to issues like hummasexashul marriage.

To refresh you, the Ninth reads:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.