Can't laugh hard enough....

LOL....

Calling her responses "inadequate" and "insufficient," the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the highly unusual step Wednesday of asking Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers to redo significant portions of the questionnaire she had submitted to the committee just a day earlier.

Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's senior Democrat, sent Miers a letter seeking more detailed responses to a third of their original questions, covering almost every aspect of her legal work and continuing through the selection process that led to her nomination.

LOL, again...

A state court issued an arrest warrant today for Rep. Tom DeLay, requiring him to appear in Texas for booking on state conspiracy and money laundering charges. The court set an initial $10,000 bail as a routine step before the Texas Republican's first court appearance Friday.

DeLay, R-Texas, could be fingerprinted and photographed, although his lawyers had hoped to avoid this step.

Politician mugshots....gotta love it.

Seizing the air

Kip Esquire notices an eerie resemblance between Kelo & this -- the FCC taking back a radio frequency from a highschool and handing it to a christian broadcasting network.

Granted, as Kip says it's not the same thing, but close enough. Far as I'm concerned it's offensive enough that the FCC has the power to decide what's a more productive use of the airwaves in the first place, among other things.

Shorter, and more accurate

This is the real problem with the Democratic party: they drastically overanalyze things.

Check out that link above. Chris Hayes w/ Washington Monthly takes up paragraph after paragraph to answer the question " If Americans haven't gotten more conservative why is the GOP in charge?", and still gets it wrong. The reason is this:

The average american voter wants everything for nothing. Republicans have offered it, Democrats haven't. Kerry lost 2004 because him & Bush both offered activist government but Kerry showed people the bill for it.

He tries to say that people want more social programs & more spending on existing ones and don't care about taxes, when in reality them not thinking about taxes shows they're not making the association between the two. I'd recommend the following poll question show up on those surveys the media keeps citing:

"Would you support _____% increase in spending on X if it meant your taxes would go up by _____%?"

The result of that would say where people REALLY stand. If made to understand that what they want would be paid for out of their own pocket, most would say No, no matter what it was.

Yeah, right

Apparently Michael Chertoff has never heard the phrase "gotta crawl before you can walk":

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department aims without exception to expel all those who enter the United States illegally. "Our goal at DHS (Homeland Security) is to completely eliminate the 'catch and release' enforcement problem, and return every single illegal entrant, no exceptions.

Tell that to all the people hiring illegal immigrants in the Gulf Coast...

Though I gotta admit, he gets the idea in one respect:

Thousands of "Mexicans who are caught entering the United States illegally are returned immediately to Mexico. But other parts of the system have nearly collapsed under the weight of numbers. The problem is especially severe for non-Mexicans apprehended at the southwest border," Chertoff explained.

"Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities," he added.

IMO, this is what we should actually be concerned with. The reason so much of the immigration picture is cloudy is because the ones raising the largest fuss seem to be more worried about mexican workers who are unlikely to be a true security threat. I don't like it myself, but not because of the workers themselves, more because of what it says about our security in general -- if you can get in to work here w/o much trouble then you can get in to blow something up.

It's getting to the point where it'd make more sense to just put in place a guest worker program, so as to seperate out the ones we really shouldn't be screaming about. Border security shouldn't be seen as "labor security".

Re: that country we're occupying still

A wiseman once said you can't have vote fraud without voting:

Iraq's electoral commission said Monday it intended to audit ``unusually high'' numbers in results coming from most provinces in the country's landmark referendum on the draft constitution....The electoral commission's statement came as Sunni Arab lawmaker Meshaan al-Jubouri claimed fraud had occurred in Saturday's election - including instances of voting in hotly contested regions by pro-constitution Shiites from other areas - repeating earlier comments made by other Sunni officials over the weekend.

This would've been the case no matter what happened. Why? Because shiites and sunnis don't trust each other.

The vote means zilch.

New term, new screwup

Supreme Court to Missouri: "Pay for it anyway"....

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for a Missouri inmate to undergo an abortion, saying it won't block a judge's order telling state officials to take her to a St. Louis clinic.

The woman, who is in about her 17th week of pregnancy, sought a court order after prison officials, citing a state policy that discourages abortion, refused to transport her to a clinic.

They didn't quite describe that state policy properly there. Here's what it really was:

A federal judge in Missouri had ruled that the state must take a prisoner at the Vandalia women's prison to St. Louis for an abortion, despite a policy by the Corrections Department that it cannot help a woman obtain an abortion, because that would violate state law prohibiting tax dollars from being used in an abortion proceeding. (emphasis mine)

I don't get this. Now, I'm pro-choice, but I understand why people would be offended at the idea of tax dollars going to provide abortions (her family would've paid for the procedure itself, but the location was in St Louis). Hell, I feel it'd be no different than subsidizing anything else that people may oppose. This would be offensive even if the woman weren't in prison, but it's even worse that this is a convict and people's taxes are going to making her life slightly more convenient.

Where is the rationale? Isn't the point to incarceration that the offender forfeits rights by violating those of others?

Everyone wants an excuse...

Um...about that riot that broke out in Ohio over the neo-nazi demonstration? I have a question...

In the days leading up to a white supremacist march, ministers pleaded with residents to stay calm and community leaders organized peace rallies. Authorities even delayed releasing the route so protesters wouldn't know where the group planned to march. It wasn't enough to stop an angry mob that included gang members from looting and burning a neighborhood bar, smashing the windows of a gas station and hurling rocks and bottles at police on Saturday. Twelve officers were injured, one suffering a concussion when a brick flew through her cruiser window....

Much of the anger boiled over because people were upset that city leaders were willing to allow the supremacists to walk through the neighborhood and shout insults, residents and authorities said. "You can't allow people to come challenge a whole city and not think they weren't going to strike back," said Kenneth Allen, 47, who watched the violence begin near his home. (emphasis mine)

How in the hell is tearing up your OWN neighborhood "striking back"??

I didn't think much of this at first, but clearly the ignorance level is through the roof. Everyone knew the other thugs in the area were going to "get theirs", no surprise there, I'm concerned about the otherwise normal folks that thought rioting at a meeting of supremecist nutjobs was going to accomplish anything. Take a look at how the whole mess was covered on the "news" -- they basically stripped away much of the context behind it. What do you think some people in the suburbs have going through their heads when they see that sensationalistic garbage burst through their fog of normalcy? As if there isn't enough racial panic floating around lately, the last thing we needed NOW was another opportunity for the media to show a sea of blacks in disarray and accompany it with a pseudo-"objective" wink and nod.

I'd be surprised if those goose-stepping jerkoffs weren't already using the incident in their propaganda.

Pointlessness

Re: when Rove gets indicted:

Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told TIME. Resignation is the much more likely scenario, they say. The same would apply to I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the Vice President's chief of staff, who also faces a possible indictment. A former White House official says Rove's break with Bush would have to be clean--no "giving advice from the sidelines"--for the sake of the Administration. (emphasis mine)

This would assume that Karl Rove's resignation would create some form of force-field around Bush. Like they'd suddenly stop tying his actions in with the administration simply because he would no longer be an employee.

Excuse me while I laugh...

Imagine if this logic actually applied in the real world. Gang members could walk on their crimes simply by saying "I ain't down with them no more" when caught. If this doesn't serve as yet more proof that political know-how isn't related to actual intelligence, I don't know what does.

Trying somethin new

That "something new" being a different format for my blogging...

I ain't abandonin this site, no, but all new posts will be mirrored between the two. Depending on how this works, either it'll prove worthless an' I'll delete that other site, or this one will become an archive/mirror. I'll keep you posted as it goes.

BTW: Unless I specifically say to do so, DO NOT CHANGE ANY OF YOUR BOOKMARKS!