Category: Politics

The Rude Pundit has a really good take on the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. It’s worth a read (unless you’re at work and your employer has a profanity filter in place). Here’s a snippet:

Democrats oughta take a look at King beyond his having had a dream and his having been to the mountaintop and his having been assassinated. Because King knew – he f—ing knew – that one thing that made him a leader of the disenfranchised is that he spoke their language. Even as those around him believed (and some still believe) that King made a mistake in his expansion of his movement, King knew that no one is truly free until we all are free. He had to bring whites into the movement on a broad basis or the fight was never going to end. He had to undercut the trump card of the powerful in their ability to divide the underclasses, and that meant owning the rhetorical God to the point that whenever God is mentioned, the automatic association is with the civil rights, economic justice, and anti-war movements (think of how successful the right is in the use of the word “Christian”).

Who said this?

“For too long, too many people dependent on Social Security have been cruelly frightened by individuals seeking political gain through demagoguery and outright falsehood, and this must stop. The future of Social Security is much too important to be used as a political football.”

If you guessed President Ronald Reagan, you’d be right.

The Gipper was right about that one.

So what’s the answer? What should a responsible press do when faced with a president who baldly lies over and over about stuff like this [Social Security] in a blatant attempt to scare the hell out of people? Somebody needs to figure it out, because people like George Bush have no incentive to stop lying if the press lets them get away with it.

Edit – forgot to source this: Kevin Drum.

It’s official – there are no WMDs in Iraq and the people sent to find them have come home.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

But instead of saying, “we were wrong, there were no WMDs”, you’ll never hear a word of regret coming forth from BushCo.

More fodder for the tinfoil hat brigade — but even so this is almost certainly unconstitutional and ought to be overturned if signed into law:

Usually, 218 lawmakers – a majority of the 435 members of Congress – are required to conduct House business, such as passing laws or declaring war.
But under the new rule, a majority of living congressmen no longer will be needed to do business under “catastrophic circumstances.”
Instead, a majority of the congressmen able to show up at the House would be enough to conduct business, conceivably a dozen lawmakers or less.
The House speaker would announce the number after a report by the House Sergeant at Arms. Any lawmaker unable to make it to the chamber would effectively not be counted as a congressman.
The circumstances include “natural disaster, attack, contagion or similar calamity rendering Representatives incapable of attending the proceedings of the House.”
The House could be run by a small number of lawmakers for months, because House vacancies must be filled by special elections. Governors can make temporary appointments to the Senate.
Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), one of few lawmakers active on the issue, argued the rule change contradicts the U.S. Constitution, which states that “a majority of each (House) shall constitute a quorum to do business”.

Well, this is a nasty piece of work that Delegate John A. Cosgrove (R) of Chesapeake is trying to enact into law over in the Virginia legislature.

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman’s responsibility to report the death to the law-enforcement agency in the jurisdiction of which the delivery occurs within 12 hours after the delivery. A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor.

As Democracy for Virginia graphically points out, this means if you live in Virginia and suffer a miscarriage, you’re a criminal if you don’t call the police to report that fact within the first 12 hours afterwards.

Adding insult to injury, as D4V puts it,

Suffering a miscarriage is no crime, but Delegate Cosgrove wants to make it a crime for a woman to fail to violate her own privacy in the first 12 hours after a miscarriage, so let