Not very. Still, any scent of defeat for the Republicans, be it a whiff of stale roadkill or the rank, vile stench of rotting flesh ‘morality’ has them back at the drawing board. This time, their plan is downright ugly: usurping electoral votes through a referendum that is likely to pass unless we educate the citizens of California.
Several conservative lawyers and lawmakers in the Sunshine State have introduced the so-called “Presidential Election Reform Act,” which would give electoral votes to whatever candidate wins an individual county. That would rob California’s Democratic power of about 20 electoral votes and probably cost the Democratic candidate the presidential election.
The citizens of California don’t seem to understand the law because the conservatives haven’t bothered to explain it to them, probably because doing so would mean its demise at the polls. (Well, duh!)
I’m all for overhauling the Constitution and throwing out the Electoral College. A national vote is the fairest way to decide the president. But piecemeal manipulation of a system that is only convenient when it works for one party is deplorable.
Please spread the word about this nefarious state proposal.
Thanks to the pillars of moral hypocrisy like Alan Keyes, a preacher and politician who disowned his own daughter after she came out as a lesbian, the public knows all about the horrible ordeals that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people endure when they choose to reveal their sexual identities to their parents. What may not be as obvious to the American people is that 86 percent of this country is Christian, and a great number of Atheist and Christian families have extremely emotional fights over the religious choices of children and parents. I myself fought bitterly for the right to go to a church that my parents thought was a cult because I went there so often. In truth, it was because people didn’t have as many catfights on holy ground.
Well, there’s this video going around the internet where someone — presumably a disillusioned sibling — covertly taped a fight between a mother and her son about his assertion of Atheism. It’s both hilarious and frightening: hilarious, because the mom is obviously an uptight, hypocritical tyrant who threatens to cancel Christmas (”because Christmas is about JESUS!”) and frightening because it show how common it is for weak-minded individuals to resort to verbal and/or physical threats when faced with the possibility of co-inhabiting a house with someone who disagrees with their beliefs. The video is a great example of how NOT to behave when discussing your religion with others.
This really isn’t the way to convert your kid back to Catholicism.
The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.
The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.
What this means is whatever or whoever the F.B.I. determines to be ‘relevant’ or within a suspect’s “community of interest” is fair game. Say someone named Margie Johnson shares a name with a suspected terrorist sympathizer in Scotland. That name comes up on the T.S.A.’s No-Fly list when she goes to an airport. Now, assuming that the two Margie Johnsons are one and the same (and that’s a big if, but the T.S.A. screw-ups are a beef for another barbecue), the F.B.I. would keep track of her calls and any meetings, activities, etc. that they deem suspicious.
It turns out Margie attends a local genealogy group meeting every Saturday at the local library. She also checks out a few books afterwards and usually returns those books in a few days. Since the feds tend to assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent, maybe they think these group meetings are suspicious and that she’s passing secret messages in the library books or learning how to build bombs.
Too bad you joined that group two weeks ago. The national security letter that went out? It covers everyone involved in the group. You thought you were just trying to find your lost great uncle from Romania!
It also covers anyone who was in the library and checked out or turned in a book in the time frames when Margie was present in the library. The library has to send their records of electronic checkouts and drop-offs and give the F.B.I. the names of all of those people. Now they’ll follow you and everyone else the sweep turns up. It’s already established that the F.B.I. has used its terrorist surveillance field agents and local law enforcement to monitor anti-war activists and others critical of the Bush administration.
In 2005, the Bureau instructed a telecommunications company to provide “a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.”
There are a lot of ways in which the vague language applied in many cases could be interpreted.
Hypothetically speaking, of course. But “relative” is a ‘relative’ term nowadays.
Not that police don’t taser their fair share of middle-class caucasians, but it seems to me, knowing both Pittsburgh and the pre-supposition of the guilt of African-American men in the city, that the attack of two police officers against a Shawn Hicks, who they tasered three times, once before he woke up from sleep and another after he had shown them identification, that the incident involved racial prejudice.
Read it for yourselves; it’s hard enough to believe as it is. Tony Norman wrote about the incident in his Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column today. It’s entitled, “Tasered at his own home: the Shawn Hicks story.”
We all knew it was only a matter of time before that whole “we’re-the-government-and-we-can-send-out-letters-and-tell-you-to-turn-over-private-information-on-your-clients-and-you-can’t-say-anything-because-of-national-security-risks” thing blew up like a spark in sawdust. Of course, I didn’t think it would take this long for some sane judge to finally bring the hammer down on a ridiculous provision that makes every U.S. citizen guilty until proven innocent, but better late than never.
This is a terrific, if possibly short-lived, victory for the ACLU against the Bush administration. But underneath all of the lawsuits, the threats, the rhetoric and the fine print, one essential truth has come to light:
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