brainrow

• 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?

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.

…

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!

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on the 60th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death:

Last week – April 12, to be exact – was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

…

That more wasn’t made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it’s a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was “to make a country in which no one is left out.” That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We’re now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.

…

Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.

The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.

“The test of our progress,” said Roosevelt, “is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?

Washington Post writer Dana Milbank:

lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,'” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to “engage in violence.”

“The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up,” [conservative activist Phyllis] Schlafly said to applause yesterday.

(You can listen to Vieira’s invocation of Stalin here. The audio quality isn’t very good.)

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

It’s not for nothing that Mr. DeLay’s nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a “body bag.” The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right’s anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope’s funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith” staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, “Death solves all problems; no man, no problem.” The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get “a few more bodyguards.” It wasn’t necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay’s threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they’ve got a political Armageddon on their hands.

Republican Senator and video diagnostician Bill Frist joins the jihad:

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as “against people of faith” for blocking President Bush’s nominees.

In the 1970s, there was a late-night television commercial for a correspondence school offering training for an exciting career as a game warden or park ranger. Toward the end of his spiel, the announcer held up a leather badge holder with a gleaming metal badge, and said, “Carry a badge! Enforce the law! Arrest violators!”

Somewhere out in the vast television audience, there were people who were stirred to their very soul by those words—people ravenous for the power to push someone around. These folks are the real-life counterparts of Barney Fife and Eric Cartman, but in real life, they are all mean spirit, not at all cute or funny.

One of the first tasks of good police training is to weed out people like that. I hope it’s tough for them to become game wardens and park rangers, too.

I thought of that old commercial when I saw this:

The State Department’s former intelligence chief yesterday described John R. Bolton, President Bush’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, as a “bully” who abused his authority and power, intimidated intelligence analysts, and damaged the integrity of the agency.

Bolton’s behavior “brings real question to my mind about his suitability for high office,” said Carl W. Ford Jr. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is considering Bolton’s nomination, that he is a loyal Republican, a staunch supporter of Bush and a “huge fan” of Vice President Cheney. “I’m as conservative as John Bolton is,” Ford said. “But the fact is that the collateral damage and the personal hurt that he causes is not worth the price that had to be paid.”

…

Ford called Bolton “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy. He’s got a bigger kick, and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he’s kicking. And he stands out. I don’t have any other example to give you of someone who acts this way.”

Much of the world thinks all Americans are like this. Only the Bush Administration would think of sending someone like Bolton to the United Nations to prove them right.

Some fun George W. Bush videos, found via This Modern World.

Forty-four years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to fly into space.

It’s been reported that after he returned, he said, “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.”

Apparently he looked out the window, saw the curving horizon, the deep black sky above and the earth, blue and white, below. He watched the sun rise and set. And he thought, “Nope, no God here!”

That kind of blind certainty can come only from unquestioning faith, I think. Atheism was the official government-sanctioned religion of the Soviet Union, like Islam in Iran and Afghanistan, or Judaism in Israel. Gagarin, apparently, was a True Believer.

Space exploration has come a long way since Gagarin’s pioneering flight. Men have walked on the moon. Robotic explorers have visited every planet in our solar system except Pluto. We communicate via satellite; our weather reports include photos from orbiting spacecraft, and we take that all for granted. The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us astonishing images of the universe around us.

The Bush administration is cutting money for the Hubble telescope from the NASA budget, but they will include funds in the 2006 budget to de-orbit the telescope, sending it to a fiery death in the earth’s atmosphere. Many reasons have been given for that decision — the Hubble Telescope is too expensive, a maintenance mission is too dangerous, new technology will make better alternatives available. I can’t help wondering whether there’s another, unspoken reason.

Biblical literalists can find it difficult to reconcile images of things a billion light years from earth with their certainty that God created the heaven and the earth about 6,000 years ago. Blinded by certainty, they can look and look at the Hubble pictures, but they don’t see God. So, down with the Hubble telescope!

This administration embraces the literalists on many issues. Was Hubble, too, sacrificed to blind faith?

New York Times columnist Frank Rich watched the ’round-the-clock coverage of the papal funeral and saw A Culture of Death, Not Life:

Mortality — the more graphic, the merrier — is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we’ve feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV’s top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time “CSI.” To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness’s cortex with Ms. Schiavo’s.

…

What’s disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What’s unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul’s vision of a “culture of life.” This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 — some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties — all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

Two days after terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jerry Falwell said God allowed the attacks “to give us probably what we deserve.” He said, “The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this,” and went on to assign blame to People for the American Way, federal courts, feminists, gays and abortion rights supporters, “all of them who tried to secularize America.” (Listen to him here.)

Today, Falwell is in serious condition at Lynchburg General Hospital. The Washington Post reports that doctors have upgraded him from critical to “serious but stable.” We must hope that he recovers, so he can tell us why God is punishing him.

That, religious right, is what a low blow feels like.

Saudi columnist Dr. Sulaiman Al Hattlan, on the PBS program Frontline:

I think the whole culture of education in Saudi Arabia gave people dangerous tools—tools to teach people how to hate, tools of hatreds, tools of anger—not tools of understanding the reality of the world.

That sounds a lot like Fox News.

Soon, we will read or hear that Terri Schiavo is dead.

When the news does come, I think I will shed a few tears. I’ll feel a sense of loss, even though I never met Mrs. Schiavo, and the sad news will not be sudden or surprising. I don’t think I will be alone in shedding tears. We humans—most of us, anyway—are just wired that way. We can’t be aware of the suffering of another person without suffering a little bit, ourselves.

I think that’s why I’ve been half-blind with rage this week, when politicians, like vampires, thought there might be some profit to be gained from this family’s misery—“a great political issue,” in the words of a memo for Republican senators.

President Bush, who presided over the executions of 152 prisoners as governor of Texas, suddenly declared that “it is always wise to err on the side of life.”

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay publicly vilified Schiavo’s husband, told the Family Research Council that the real issue was “more than just Terri Schiavo,” and complained about “attacks against the conservative moment, against me and against many others.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a cardiologist before he became a politician with presidential ambitions, looked at a videotape of Mrs. Schiavo recorded several years ago and declared that the neurologists who were actually treating her had mis-diagnosed the case. Either Frist is one hell of a doctor, or he’s a very poor excuse for a man.

There will be many tears when Terri Schiavo dies. The vampires will move on to their next target. Sadly, tears alone won’t be enough to wash away this stain.

(From cNet’s news.com.com🙂

[Federal Elections Commissioner] Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign’s Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate’s press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

So I guess I’d better just keep my big mouth shut.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes about Auschwitz:

Here is my fear. Because we cannot understand Auschwitz, because it is an immense bump in the road in our belief in a good God — “a just God,” the president said in his inaugural address — we will let it slip from memory, remembered maybe like some statue in the town square that memorializes something or other, maybe a war, maybe a man. Reminders will seem like nagging, and when the survivors are finally gone (they have been an incredibly hardy lot) so, too, will be the obligation to remember. Ah, what a relief!

Then, bit by bit, Auschwitz will fade, becoming something that happened in the last century to people who some may insist had it coming anyway — Jews and commies and Gypsies and homosexuals . . . mostly. For most people, it may become — it is already becoming — too dense a historic burden, a hideously heavy truth about who we can be, not just who we would like to be. Prince Harry just chucked it all. Someday, I fear, so shall we all and then — as it has in Rwanda and at Srebrenica — it will happen again.

Tony Blair:

If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too.

Reminds me of a joke that’s making the rounds — something to offend everyone:

Last month a worldwide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:

“Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?”

The survey was a huge failure…

In Africa they didn’t know what ‘food’ meant.
In Eastern Europe they didn’t know what ‘honest’ meant.
In Western Europe they didn’t know what ‘shortage’ meant.
In China they didn’t know what ‘opinion’ meant.
In the Middle East they didn’t know what ‘solution’ meant.
In South America they didn’t know what ‘please’ meant.
And in the USA they didn’t know what ‘the rest of the world’ meant.