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John Kerry:

Every day Republican leaders are crossing lines that should never be crossed:

• the line that says a leader in the House of Representatives should never carelessly threaten or intimidate federal judges
• the line that says the leader of the Senate should never accuse those who disagree with his political tactics of waging a war against people of faith
• the line that says respect for core constitutional principles should never be undermined by a political party’s quest for power
• and most important of all, the line that says a political party’s leaders should never let their obsession with amassing power, or just with politics, overwhelm the needs and interests of the people who elected them — America’s families.

Yes, the Republican-controlled Congress has been so busy walking America’s highways and byways — grandstanding on Terri Schiavo and baseball players, obstructing ethics investigations, and attacking the independence of the courts — that they’ve forgotten to pay the war bill:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has sent letters to congressional leaders urging them to pass the final 2005 budget supplemental bill before the Army runs out of operating funds.

The Army has slowed its spending, so it can continue operations in Afghanistan and Iraq through early May when the funds are due to run out, Rumsfeld said.

He sent the letters Wednesday, along with handwritten notes that read, “Our folks out there need these funds.”

Tom DeLay is the true face of the Republican Party these days. Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter says DeLay must stay, to give voters a clear choice in the next election:

A couple of years ago, Tom DeLay was chomping on a cigar at a Washington restaurant with some lobbyists. The manager went over to tell him he couldn’t smoke because the restaurant was located on property leased from the federal government, which bars smoking. “I am the federal government,” DeLay replied, in words that will follow the onetime exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, like ants at a picnic.

The line reeks of the arrogance and self-importance that may bring DeLay low, but it also has the advantage of being true: all three branches of the federal government belong to Republicans, and the autocratic House majority leader is the purest representation of the breed. On every issue—ethics, the environment, guns, tax cuts, judges—he is a clarifying figure for anyone who might be confused about the true nature of today’s GOP.

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If DeLay goes down, his shamelessness will go with him, which will make it harder to see the GOP’s true agenda.

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DeLay’s views on muscling the judiciary and ending the separation of church and state (which he believes is a fiction) offend the Constitution. That makes it too important to leave to the media and the rest of the Washington scandal machine to remedy. This job belongs to the voters, who can hammer the Hammer by siding against his many acolytes in Congress. Let’s make 2006 a referendum on the right wing. For that, DeLay must stay.

Another front in the jihad: banning books and authors:

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

“I don’t look at it as censorship,” says State Representative Gerald Allen. “I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.”

Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” has lesbian characters.

Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare.

Yeah, books are dangerous. You start reading, and before long, you’re thinking.

If you think people with this mindset intend to stop anywhere short of death camps, you don’t know them very well.

Update: You know, I think this belongs here:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out.

— Martin Niemöller

I’m a bigot, all right. I’ve used Apple computers since I bought my first computer way back in 1983. I had to use Windows computers at work, and I tried, not very successfully, to overcome my prejudices against the criminal monopolist Microsoft. But a few years ago, when Apple Computer seemed to be near collapse, I declared that if Microsoft was the only software choice available, I’d just do without a computer. It’s not entirely a rational response; some of Microsoft’s products are very good. Some aren’t. Now, via John Moltz’s weblog, I’ve got a specific reason to be glad I’m a Macintosh user:

Microsoft is currently paying a $20,000 a month retainer to former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed’s consulting firm Century Strategies. Which now begs the question of whether Reed was in any way involved with Microsoft’s recent decision to abandon its decades long support for gay civil rights in order to curry favor with anti-gay bigots of the radical right.

First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams on The Daily Show:

If you take away an independent judiciary, you take away the first amendment, as well.

Are we winning or losing the War on Terror? The Bush Administration deep-sixed a long-standing annual report on terrorism which showed terror attacks increasing, not declining. Now they want partial credit for almost catching bad guys. We nearly caught Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. Now, according to CNN, officials are bragging that they nearly caught Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

U.S. troops chased down a suspicious vehicle and later determined that al-Zarqawi had been in it but had escaped.

Gosh, if we actually started winning the War on Terror, there might be less reason for the extraordinary powers the Bush Administration has claimed for itself. Hmmm…

It’s a whole new era for American Liberty—telecommunications industry representatives have been kicked off an international commission for supporting John Kerry:

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week’s meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.

The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush’s second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.

The latest report from the National Counterterrorism Center doesn’t seem to support the Bush Administration line that they’re making excellent progress in the War on Terror. So, following standard Administration procedure, they’re eliminating the report:

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Now that’s spin doctoring!

More good stuff by cartoonist Ruben Bolling. Same deal as before: you can click to get free access after viewing a short ad. Watch the ad once, and you can access any of the cartoons for the rest of the day.

Meet the Regulators, a crack squad of specialists handpicked by President Bush to regulate industry for the public good.

In 2002, a Wall Street Journal editorial complained that people who make $12,000 a year or less pay “a little less than 4 percent of income in taxes” and called them “lucky duckies.” (Really!) Now, the administration wants to rescue Social Security for Lucky Ducky.

Judge Scalia in “Kids These Days.”

Judge Scalia walks a lonely path across the American states, meting out justice.

It’s a few days old, but This Modern World remembers the murders in Oklahoma City, and reminds us just what Ann Coulter stands for:

Ten years ago today, at 9:02 a.m. midwestern time, terrorist Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Among the victims were 19 children attending day care in the building.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

–Ann Coulter as quoted in the New York Observer, Aug. 20, 2002

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.’”

–Ann Coulter, from an interview with Right Wing News

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling on President Bush’s Culture of Life Blowout Sale.

(The cartoon is easy to see if you’re a paid subscriber to Salon.com. If not, you can click for a “Day Pass,” which will show you an ad, then give you access to the Salon site.)

• Conservative columnist Ann Coulter:

College professors are the only people in America who assume they can’t be fired for what they say.

No, she’s not upset that the rest of us lack freedom of speech. She’s upset that anyone has it.

• On Veterans Day last year, the ABC television network broadcast Saving Private Ryan. But sixty-six ABC affiliates balked at carrying the movie, fearing indecency fines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC knew the content of the movie, but wouldn’t say whether they would fine stations for airing it.

Republicans in Congress have moved to increase the indecency fines the FCC can levy from $32,500 to $500,000 — high enough to still almost any tongue. Republican Senator Ted Stevens wants to extend the FCC’s authority to regulate content to include cable and satellite TV and radio. In a court case on a different issue, the FCC has claimed:

regulatory power over all instrumentalities, facilities, and apparatus “associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received” via all interstate radio and wire communication.

Broadcast, cable, satellite, internet… am I missing anything?

• House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, in the Washington Times, discussing some things he opposes (emphasis added):

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.

• California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a 1990 profile in U.S. News and World Report:

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it… People need somebody to watch over them… Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

Connect the dots. What do you see?

Every couple weeks, it seems, I get a new flyer from my internet service provider asking me to sign up for their internet-based telephone service. And, for the past few months, my internet connectivity has gone flaky about once a week, usually for about a day at a time.

At the moment, I have very poor connectivity, but it’s the best I’ve had for two days. There is reason to believe it’s not going to get better until Saturday, at the earliest. I may not be able to post anything new here until these problems are resolved.

I didn’t know that Tom DeLay and Bill Frist knew enough about network configuration to pull this off, but I shouldn’t be surprised. The Amazing Dr. Frist can do anything!

Right-wing politicians complaining about judicial activism are very selective about their targets:

Not since the 1960’s, when federal judges in the South were threatened by cross burnings and firebombs, have judges been so besieged. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, set off a furor when he said judges could be inviting physical attacks with controversial decisions. And last week the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, called for an investigation of the federal judges in the Terri Schiavo case, saying ominously: “We set up the courts. We can unset the courts.”

Conservatives claim that they are rising up against “activist judges,” who decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law.

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The inconsistency of the conservative war on judges was apparent in the Terri Schiavo ordeal. Mr. DeLay, an outspoken critic of activist courts, does not want to investigate the federal trial judge and the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for judicial activism, but for the opposite: for refusing to overturn the Florida state courts’ legal decisions, and Michael Schiavo’s decisions about his wife’s medical care.

The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court’s conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting – it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that “the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world.” That, of course, isn’t a constitutional argument – it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.

George W. Bush is trying to dismantle the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Roman Catholic Church has selected a new pope who may try to dismantle the legacy of Pope John XXIII.

He criticised the introduction of the non-Latin Mass as a “tragic breach” and in the 1980s dubbed homosexuality an “intrinsic moral evil” and said rock music could be a “vehicle of anti-religion”.

In 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – an organisation once known as the Inquisition – and has since stamped his rigorous theological conservatism on the Church.

It is claimed that he saw his mission as defending Catholic teaching following liberal moves after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

He had public disagreements with moderate German Cardinal Walter Kaspe and has also been accused of prompting decrees from Rome barring Catholic priests from counselling pregnant teenagers about choices available to them.

Others claim he blocked German Catholics from sharing communion with Lutherans at a joint gathering in 2003.

Latin was not the language of Jesus, but of the Caesars. Pope John XXIII’s “tragic breach” was to reach out to ordinary people. While Karel Wojtyla (John Paul II) fought the Nazis occupying his native Poland during World War II, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) was a member of the Hitler Youth. Ah, progress!