Bush Hires Mad Scientist

Just one more reason to be glad we put a brakeman on this runaway train in the midterms -- the Bush administration has a preference for crazy people. John Bolton has a rage problem, Rummie has conversations with himself, and they're tight with the religious right -- who are all a brick short of a load.

Let me define crazy for this post; someone who rejects reality in favor of an ideological fantasyland. The neocons -- Bolton and Rumsfeld -- are this kind of crazy. Everything's falling down around our ears and they're convinced they're doing a great job. At the end, Rummie excelled at craziness, comparing himself to Churchill and displaying a high opinion of himself that has not been supported by the facts. Rumsfeld is almost literally the stereotypical basketcase who's convinced that he's Napoleon.

In a triumph of ideology over reason, Bushco has pursued a public health policy that just plain doesn't work. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the administration has not only been pushing a policy that doesn't work, they're pushing a program that they have to know doesn't work.

ABC News:

The informational materials distributed by government-funded abstinence programs are not reviewed for scientific accuracy, according to [a recent GAO] report, nor are the abstinence programs required to provide any assurance that their materials are accurate. In some instances, according to the report, those materials are providing inaccurate claims about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases.

This information is being put out by the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS), who offer this explanation for the problem:

TPMMuckraker:

...In response, the Department of Health and Human Services -- which has on staff more than a few scientists and other educated types -- said the GAO's suggestion was useless. "GAO never defines the term 'scientific accuracy' in its report," HHS complained. "As such, it is difficult to precisely determine the criteria employed by GAO in making the recommendations as to scientific accuracy."

"Oh! It's so difficult defining 'true' and 'untrue!'" They might as well have said, "We're idiots and don't understand this concept of 'doesn't work.'"

Given that HHS isn't all that concerned with scientific accuracy -- hell, they claim they don't even know what it means -- it's no surprise that this sort of thing is playing out at the Office of Population Affairs with the appointment of Dr. Eric Keroack. Keroack is currently the head of A Woman‘s Concern -- a pro-life group in Massachusetts. Not surprisingly, this has made a lot of people unhappy.

Associated Press:

"The appointment of anti-birth control, anti-sex education advocate Dr. Eric Keroack to oversee the nation‘s family planning program is striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation‘s priorities," Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.

Even better, Keroack's an honest to goodness quack -- with a bad case of crazy-eyes, to boot (see photo). Call him a mad scientist.

The good doctor suffers from the same problem that creationists face, bass-ackward scientific thinking. They start with a conclusion and find reasons to believe it. So Keroack believes that sex before marriage is bad for you -- physically -- and has come up with a reason why this is so. Not a good reason or even a sane reason, but a reason.

Keroack claims that emotional bonding releases oxytocin, a hormone. This bonds people to each other through attraction and love. According to Keroack, people who are promiscuous are basically abusing this hormone and will wind up crazy or something -- I'm not really sure. Talk To Action has a better explanation of his line of BS than I can give here (along with the incredibly cheesy powerpoint slides he uses).

Like creationists, Keroack's crackpottery suffers from a logical deficit -- it doesn't make a damned bit of sense. For example, there's this from his presentation:

Forty percent of couples who live together break up before they marry and of the 60 percent that do marry, 40 percent of them divorce after 10 years. ... So why do so many adults continue in a cycle of sex without a marriage commitment, cohabitation, and failed relationships? This perpetual cycle of misery is due largely to the role of oxytocin...

This is completely illogical. If the reason for the break-ups is physiological, then what the hell would marriage have to do with anything? Wouldn't the couples who'd lived together before getting married be in exactly the same situation as those who'd been married from the gitgo? Like all 'faith-based science,' buying it requires that you turn your brain off and deliberately ignore all the obvious contradictions.

Apparently, the fact that he's a junk science quack doesn't bother the administration at all. In fact, you'd imagine they see it as a strength. He's what the kooks in the religious right want and if he screws up people's lives with this crap, so what? The biblebangers get their screwball and the GOP gets the resulting votes.

It's a win/win. Well, except for all the young mothers out there who got stuck with a baby because none of this 'faith-based' crap works.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; medicine; health; Bush prefers the religious right's idea of science -- which is total crap

Glenn Beck's Still an Ass

OK, I'm not really a big fan of CNN's Glenn Beck. The main reason for this is that Beck's a first rate horse's ass. I've written about how he's made fun of the blind and muslims' names. On global warming, he dealt with rising sea levels by showing a picture of Shanghai under water and saying, "This is what would happen to Shanghai. Does anybody really care? I mean, come on. Shanghai is under water. Oh, no! Who's gonna make those little umbrellas for those tropical drinks?"

Hilarious, huh? Shanghai has a population of over nine million people -- in Beck's mind (such as it is), this is an insignificant number. It's all about those little umbrellas. In fact, Beck's such a dick that one of the top search queries bringing people to my blog is glenn beck asshole.

So it's with feigned surprise that I bring you the latest bit of Glenn Beck assholery.

Media Matters transcript from Beck's Nov. 14 show (emphasis mine):

BECK: History was made last Tuesday when Democrat Keith Ellison got elected to Congress, representing the great state of Minnesota. Well, not really unusual that Minnesota would elect a Democrat. What is noteworthy is that Keith is the first Muslim in history to be elected to the House of Representatives. He joins us now.

Congratulations, sir.

ELLISON: How you doing, Glenn? Glad to be here.

BECK: Thank you. I will tell you, may I -- may we have five minutes here where we're just politically incorrect and I play the cards face up on the table?

ELLISON: Go there.

BECK: OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I've been to mosques. I really don't believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I -- you know, I think it's being hijacked, quite frankly.

With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, "Let's cut and run." And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."

Glenn, how about you prove to everyone you've got a functional brain? I'm guessing you'd need some help with that one.

There's always been a tinge of racism to Beck's show -- I refer you back to his Shanghai bit and his frequent attacks on muslims. And he defends it the same way he defended it here, by calling on 'political correctness.' "Oh, don't be so PC," is the last surviving refuge of racists. Their off-color jokes and comments aren't the problem. No, the problem is that you're too 'politically correct' and that makes you intolerant... of racism.

How awful of me.

You can argue that this approach is paying off for Beck, unfortunately. According to TVNewser, "Headline News host Glenn Beck delivered his best ratings ever on Wednesday night, with 547,000 demo viewers at 7pm and 384,000 demo viewers at 9. 'Glenn Beck' was the #1 cable show in the demo for the night."

He did it with a major ad campaign for a special titled "Exposed: The Extremist Agenda..." where he 'exposed' the fact that islamic terrorists are bad people. Apparently, there's someone out there who gets cable and doesn't know this. You'd think he'd have run this before the elections, but I guess he figured the results meant that people aren't freaked out enough. CNN's ad for the show features a link to a video, reading, "Watch Glenn tell you why as many Americans as possible should watch his special tonight." It was scheduled to coincide with the premier of the english version of Al Jazeera, which isn't broadcast in the US. Nothing like a non-existent threat to freak people out over.

On the bright side, Beck gives Keith Olbermann a chance to name the "Worst Person in the World" someone other than Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter.

Media Matters:

OLBERMANN: But our winner, conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Interviewing Congressman-elect Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who will become the first man of the Muslim faith to serve in the House, Beck actually said this to Ellison: quote, "No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, 'Let's cut and run.' And I have to tell you, what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' " Hey, Glenn, you divisive fearmonger. How 'bout you prove to us that you're not working with our enemies? Glenn Beck, today's "Worst Person in the World."

Congratulations Glenn, you're now as widely known as a dickhead as O'Reilly, Coulter, and Limbaugh. What an accomplishment.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; media; Islam Keith Ellison; CNN's Glenn Beck sure enjoys that racism, huh?

No Good Choice for House Majority Leader

Unfortunately, the choice facing House Democrats as they choose their Majority Leader is the same choice too many americans face when they vote at the polls -- a choice between 'sucks' and 'sucks more.'

In deciding the lesser of two evils, dems have to choose between John Murtha and Steny Hoyer; the former being 'sucks' and the latter being 'sucks more.' In Murtha's favor is the way he broke the ice for moderates in opposing the war. That gained him a lot of friends and name recognition among the antiwar crowd, while making him a target of right wing nuts who accuse him of being 'far left'. Anyone who opposes the war is 'far left.'

At truthdig, Robert Scheer writes:

...Clarity of purpose in getting out of Iraq is all important, which is why the war’s supporters are so desperate to smear forthright critics such as Murtha. Witness Dick Morris joining conservative commentator Sean Hannity in blasting Pelosi for backing Murtha: “He’s a leftist, he’s a cheerleader for MoveOn.org, and she could have chosen a centrist,” Morris said on Fox News. “Instead, she chose the most left guy she could find.”

Ridiculous. Murtha, a leftist? Maybe on Iraq, but his record on everything from abortion to gun control to Pentagon budgets makes him an old-school conservative Democrat in this country, as centrist as they come. Of course, pollster operative Morris knows this full well, because it was precisely why Murtha’s call for withdrawal was such a political earthquake.

But Murtha has a real problem -- he's ethically tainted. On the 15th, Murtha had to explain calling an ethics reform package "total crap." TPMMuckraker reports Murtha as telling Chris Matthews, "What I said was, it’s total crap, the idea we have to deal with an issue like this, when. . . we’ve got a war going on and we got all these other issues."

Another congress critter might not have needed to explain the comment, especially someone as gruff and blunt as Murtha. But Murtha carries with him a history of bad ethical calls, both in votes and in actions. He barely escaped ABSCAM, an FBI sting operation that cost six congressman -- mostly Democrats -- their careers and put them up on charges of corruption. Murtha was never charged, but a damned good argument can be made that the only thing that saved him from the fate of his colleagues was better connections -- Tip O'Neill stepped in and headed off investigation before it began.

And his problems continue:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

Not only is Rep. Murtha beset by ethics issues, The New York Times reported on October 2, 2006 that he has consistently opposed ethics and earmark reform. [CREW executive director Melanie] Sloan continued, “Rep. Murtha’s opposition to ethics reform does not bode well for future Speaker Pelosi’s promise to enact ethics legislation in the first 100 hours of the new Congress.”

That explains why I classified Murtha as 'sucks', but why does Hoyer 'suck more?' I can't put it better than David Sirota did last December:

Finally, it has been Hoyer who has made a point of actively working against Pelosi on major congressional votes. You remember, it was Hoyer - the Democratic Whip - who refused to whip votes together to try to defeat the corporate-written Central American Free Trade Agreement. When Pelosi tried to build opposition to the disgusting bankruptcy bill, it was Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, who not only didn't whip against the bankruptcy bill, but actually voted for it, after pocketing massive campaign contributions from the banking industry. While Pelosi was taking a stand by voting against the Iraq War, Hoyer was voting for the Iraq War. And when Pelosi worked to keep her caucus together in opposing the GOP Energy Bill, it was Hoyer who voted for the nauseating legislation after pocketing more than $300,000 from energy/natural resource industry cash. That legislation that literally gave away billions of taxpayer dollars to the energy industry profiteers who proceeded to bilk Americans with higher and higher gas prices.

These are the facts of the case - they are not debatable. They are cold hard facts. The second ranking Democrat in the U.S. House is focused like a laser not on winning elections, not on helping his party, but on helping himself by trying to take down the House Minority Leader, even as she shows more and more courage and leadership.

If Murtha is ethically challenged, Hoyer is selfishly ambitious -- often putting his own career above the nation's interests and voting less on principle than self-serving strategy. That's why I'm hoping for Murtha. But it pays to remember that when choosing the lesser of two evils, you're choosing an evil. Murtha should be congratulated for his principled stand on the war and watched like a hawk.

--Wisco

UPDATE: Unfortunately, it's 'sucks more'...

Associated Press:

A Democratic spokeswoman says that House Democrats have chosen Rep. Steny Hoyer as House majority leader, the No. 2 leadership post.

Technorati tags: politics; democrats; congress; corruption; John Murtha and Steny Hoyer battle it out for the title, "Lesser of Two Evils"

Religious Right Pretends They Weren't Pimping for the GOP

The religious right has been making a lot of noise and throwing a lot of blame at the GOP for Democratic victories in the midterms. According to the Biblebanger spin, Republicans abandoned their 'core values' and people of faith made them pay for it. There's probably some truth to that -- values voters wanted GOPers to ban abortion, stop the 'homosexual agenda,' and drive the godless evolutionists from America's schools. What they got was top-heavy tax cuts, war, and corporate giveaways.

Not really what they had in mind.

Another factor was that the GOP leadership was just so awful that even the robots starting asking what was up. From global warming to net neutrality to the inaction after Katrina, values voters saw a party that seemed to be completely unconcerned with the interests of the people who'd elected them.

The leaders of the religious right, whether because they were corrupt or self-concerned or just plain stupid, were way behind their flocks in this line of thinking. But you wouldn't know it now -- no, now they're the voice of the disenfranchised.

James Dobson:

They consistently ignored the constituency that put them in power until it was late in the game and then frantically tried to catch up at the last minute. In 2004, conservative voters handed them a 10-seat majority in the Senate and a 29-seat edge in the House. And what did they do with their power? Very little that Values Voters care about.

Tony Perkins:

In the end, voters had grown tired of a party whose lapses in judgment were overshadowed only by its lapse of belief in core values. When conservatives realized that Republicans had abandoned their ideology, they ultimately abandoned the GOP.

These complaints would hold a lot more weight if these guys hadn't been such pimps for the GOP before the election.

Right Wing Watch:

...At the Values Voter Summit last month, Dobson – “like a modern Paul Revere,” according to Pat Boone – announced that the War on Terror is fundamentally a family-values issue. And at his “Stand for the Family” rallies in battleground states, he also endorsed the Bush administration’s tax cuts. Perkins, admonishing his supporters to reject candidates who “have no fear of God,” was careful to connect that message to a warning that a Democratic House would have control over pension policy.

So, before the election, Dobson and Perkins were tireless cheerleaders for the GOP. Now, they're critics. It kind of makes them look a little hypocritical -- although, looking hypocritical has never stopped the religious right before. It's kind of hard to stand for christian ideals when you're begging people to vote for modern Republicans, who's guiding principles are basically selfishness and greed.

While these evangelical leaders gripe about how the GOP got what it deserved and blames them for abandoning the principles of the religious right, a look at the results shows they're being extremely honest -- a lot of people these organizations endorsed or rated highly lost. People for The American Way put together this list of losing GOP candidates. Perkins' Family Research Counsel teamed with Dobson's Focus on the Family to rate candidates (FRC/FOF). Gary Bauer's Campaign for Working Families (CWF) made endorsements. As the list shows, their candidates didn't do very well.

GOP Incumbent House Losses:

AZ-05 (Hayworth) - 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
CA-11 (Pombo) – 57% FRC/FOF Ranking
CT-05 (Johnson) – 28% FRC/FOF Ranking
FL-22 (Shaw) – 57% FRC/FOF Ranking
IN-02 (Chocola)- 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
IN-08 (Hostettler) – 71% FRC/FOF Ranking, CWF Endorsement
IN-09 (Sodrel) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
IA-02 (Leach) – 42% FRC/FOF Ranking
KS-02 (Ryun) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking
KY-03 (Northup) – 57% FRC/FOF Ranking, CWF Endorsement
MN-01 (Gutknecht) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
NH-01 (Bradley) – 57% FRC/FOF Ranking
NH-02 (Bass) – 28% FRC/FOF Ranking
NY-19 (Kelly) – 57% FRC/FOF Ranking
NY-20 (Sweeney) – 57% FRC/FOF Ranking
NC-11 (Taylor) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
PA-04 (Hart) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking
PA-07 (Weldon) – 71% FRC/FOF Ranking, CWF Endorsement
PA-08 (Fitzpatrick) – 71% FRC/FOF Ranking
PA-10 (Sherwood) – 85% FRC/FOF Ranking

GOP Incumbent Senate Losses:

MO (Talent) 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
MT (Burns) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
OH (Dewine) - 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
PA (Santorum) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement
RI (Chafee) – 25% FRC/FOF Ranking
VA (Allen) – 100% FRC/FOF Ranking and CWF Endorsement

Well, that didn't go well, did it? If the problem is that Republicans aren't being christian enough, why did so many of the high rated and endorsed candidates lose?

Let's hope that the James Dobsons and Tony Perkins of the world have lost power as well. It sure looks like that's the case.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; propaganda; religious right leaders James Dobson and Tony Perkins pretend they weren't pimps for republicans before the elections

Democrats Got Elected Despite Our Election System, Not Because of It

Tell me which part of this statement isn't true:

There was an election a week ago. Democrats won big, Republicans lost big, and everything went great!

That's right, everything did not go great. At about 2:00 CT, the number of people who had called the voter protection line at 1-566-OUR-VOTE were as follows (as reported by Brad Blog):

By Total Calls [to 1-866-OUR-VOTE]
State Calls
PA 841
NY 399
MI 313
NC 239
CA 228
OH 225

AZ 164
MA 142
GA 131
IL 129
Total 2,811

That's nearly three thousand screwed up votes before most people even got off work. Like I said at the time, completely FUBAR.

Network World had this fun little story:

Maybe there are reports out there of these screw-ups benefiting Democratic candidates at the expense of their Republican opponents, but I just don’t come across them. From TPM Café: “My wife just came home from voting here in Webster Groves MO. She used the electronic touch-screen voting system. . . She touched Claire McCaskill's picture and the machine recorded a vote for Jim Talent. She then called one of the people running the polling center who helped her correct the problem. My wife then had to call the person over another time after it recorded her vote a Republican again. In her frustration she asked the person who was responsible for the design of this system. The polling person leaned in very close to my wife and whispered, 'We're f----d.' "

People For the American Way has a page of examples -- a lot of examples -- of voting problems. In Miami-Dade county Florida, "Voter had to use multiple voting cards before being able to cast successful ballot. This happened to everyone voter could see," in Arapahoe, Colorado, "Caller recieved two phone calls stating that her polling location had changed. She went to the new polling location and was told she was in the wrong place. She was also asked her party affiliation by an unknown person. She went to the correct polling place and was not on the list. She voted provisionally. Caller had conversations with other voters who recieved a similar call. This also happened in the 2004 election. She is sure that she is registered to vote."


And it wasn't just the machines, Republican dirty tricks were rampant. "A voting judge in Washington state telephoned to say that he received a voicemail from a woman purporting to be Maria Cantwell which instructed him to vote in the wrong precinct," and, "Sonoma, CA: The caller reported that several students, all of whom speak English as a second language, told her that their houses received intimidating calls the evening prior to the election saying 'don't vote.' The caller did not know whether the calls were live or recorded."

Just because the system worked doesn't mean it works well. The media was doing a good job of reporting these problems until the story became the Democratic landslide. And it's possible that if it weren't a landslide, these tricks and glitches would've thrown more than one race to Republicans. In fact, it may have in at least one case.

Florida Times-Union:

Elections officials began a second day of recounting votes in a southwest Florida congressional race marked by a close margin and questions about the accuracy of ATM-style touch-screen voting machines.

National attention is focused on Sarasota County where electronic voting machines reported 18,382 people - about one in eight voters - did not vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings, but made choices in other races. That rate was much higher than other counties in the district.

Sarasota elections supervisor Kathy Dent expected the electronic recount to be finished late Tuesday. But she expected recount activities to continue right up to Saturday's state-mandated results deadline. The recount involves precincts in five counties.

Surprise, surprise, it's Katherine Harris's House seat. She had to vacate the seat to run for Senate. Who reading this voted, but didn't vote in their congressional race? Buchanan currently has a massive 377 vote lead -- a number easily affected by effed up electronic ballots. The machines will just run the numbers again and spit out an identical result. The race hinges on provisional and military ballots; i.e., paper ballots.

Our election system is still screwed up and corrupt and that means our democracy is screwed up and corrupt. And the worst part is that it's screwed up in favor of phony patriots who use words like 'democracy' and 'freedom' as if they owned them. Hell, they don't even mean them when they use them. Is this the democracy that people are supposed to be dying for? When we're told that people in Iraq are fighting to protect our freedom, I have to ask, when did 'freedom' mean election fraud, rigged machines, and disenfranchisement? When did it come to mean the freedom to vote for the candidate of Republicans' choosing?

If we don't use this opportunity, this Democratic majority, to fix our democracy, it may never happen. Every election the fixers fail to fix is just one more lesson on how to fix elections. As we do nothing to stop them, they perfect their art. My worry is that we'll look at the dems in congress and think everything's fine. Everything is not fine. If things continue the way they're going, we'll have a sham democracy, Like Iran. The Mullahs will choose which candidates we're allowed to vote for and our choice will be between two slightly different shades of red.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; democrat; voting; republicans aren't the big fans of democracy they pretend to be

When Bipartisanship Hits the Fan

Bush's switch from 'stay the course' to 'adjust to win' is welcome -- if he actually means it -- but was too little, too late for the electorate. The Decider decided to live in reality at pretty much the eleventh hour and actually listen to somebody for a change. And the Republicans seem to have learned a new word -- "Bipartisanship."

The 'somebody' he'll be listening to today will be the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. You get the idea that Bush knows (or at least has a good idea of) what the recommendations will be. After all, he's picked Robert Gates, who serves on the panel, to succeed Rumsfeld. It's hard to believe that Team Bush would pick a group member without knowing what the Study Group will suggest.

Where Dick Cheney had told the nation the policy in Iraq would be "full speed ahead" (what is it with these guys and nautical terms?), Bush chief of staff Josh Bolten, apparently speaking for the broader White House consensus, told talking heads on morning news shows, "We clearly need a fresh approach." You kind of hope this means that folks are done listening to Shooter. Firing Rumsfeld would suggest the same -- the neocons look like a declining force.

On that new word, "bipartisanship" -- sure comes easy to them now, doesn't it? In a stunning display of why it's a bad idea to go on a campaign of bridge burning before an election, Bush and the GOP spent a big chunk of this past year trying to convince people that Democrats are practically allies of al Qaeda and that putting them in control would mean the death of the republic. As the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin put it the day after the election, "On a rhetorical level, it's a neck-snapping reversal from the savage smearing of Democrats as troop-hating terrorist-appeasing cowards that continued right up until last night, when the will of the voters became undeniable even by White House standards."

Now we're going to move together in the spirit of bipartisanship.

Dan Froomkin again, from a piece published on the ninth:

Washington Post:

Consider this passage in [Bush's] introductory remarks:

"Amid this time of change, I have a message for those on the front lines. To our enemies: Do not be joyful. Do not confuse the workings of our democracy with a lack of will. Our nation is committed to bringing you to justice. Liberty and democracy are the source of America's strength, and liberty and democracy will lift up the hopes and desires of those you are trying to destroy.

"To the people of Iraq: Do not be fearful. As you take the difficult steps toward democracy and peace, America is going to stand with you. We know you want a better way of life, and now is the time to seize it.

"To our brave men and women in uniform: Don't be doubtful. America will always support you. Our nation is blessed to have men and women who volunteer to serve, and are willing to risk their own lives for the safety of our fellow citizens."

On the one hand, a noble and gracious and important assurance to the world of America's enduring values and determination. On other hand -- given the ferocious way that Campaigner Bush attacked Democrats as troop-hating terrorist-appeasing cowards -- an astonishing admission that he was just making that stuff up.

So now we're supposed to ignore all of that crazy campaign stuff and concentrate on moving forward. Unfortunately, there are still robots for whom White House propaganda is gospel and they're not giving up the line so easily. As I wrote at Griper News, John Hinderacker of Power Line is all freaked out that the terrorists have won, apparently mistaking al Qaeda propaganda for reality. Mostly because terror-prop and Bush-prop have been in agreement.

And Investor's Business Daily makes the same mistake. In an editorial, they claim that John Conyers is a tool of terrorists, because there are a lot of arab americans in his district -- want a side of racism with your BS propaganda?

The dems, for their part, have to talk about bipartisanship -- they don't have the White House and they don't have a veto-proof majority. The only things that will get done will be bipartisan efforts. Well, except investigations. As the party controlling congress, they'll have the magic subpoena -- which, of course, is why the Republicans spent so much time trying to convince americans that a dem congress would bring about the fall of western civilization.

The hearings won't be bipartisan. They'll be partisan by necessity. The Abramoff scandal, the PR campaign that brought us to war, and the massive incompetence and neglect that the Iraq war and hurricane Katrina exposed were all grown on the GOP farm and, as their Bible should've warned them, you reap what you sow.

So it'll be all smiles and bipartisanship until January -- not long after that, it hits the fan.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Iraq; war; Bush ;propaganda; republican and democratic bipartisanship will last about five minutes -- and then the corruption investigations will begin

After Banning Same Sex Marriage, Religious Right Wants to Start on Divorce

Wisconsin, like far too many states, wrote bigotry into her constitution tuesday. Of the eight states that voted on bans of same sex marriage, only one -- Arizona -- defeated them. The people behind these bans must be very happy. Which is unfortunate for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the people behind these bans are freakin' nuts.

Wisconsin's main backer of the ban was a group called Family Research Institute of Wisconsin, headed by Julaine Appling. To give you an idea of what Appling's idea of marriage actually is, let's turn to her own words:

Marriage isn't just a basketful of benefits; nor is it simply about love and commitment, though those are important components. Properly expressed, marriage is a deep spiritual union; it's a beautiful picture of Christ, the bridegroom and His bride, the Church; it's a uniting of body, soul and spirit in a oneness that has no earthly parallel.

In other words, if it ain't christian, it ain't marriage. There are a lot of non-christian people in the world who'd be surprised to learn that their marriages are a sham. But tolerance of other people's religions (or lack of religion) isn't exactly the religious right's strong point.

Not content to force her religion on everyone and buoyed by a victory at the polls, Appling wants to take on divorce.

The Capital Times:

Appling said the Family Research Institute, which took the lead in fighting the same-sex marriage ban, would "judiciously" examine Wisconsin's no-fault divorce law and eventually approach legislators about introducing changes. Under the law, spouses can request termination of the marriage without having to prove marital misconduct. Appling said she could foresee proposing a longer waiting period for divorces and implementing required premarital counseling.

That's the thing about the religious right; if you let them screw other people over, sooner or later they're going to come for you. Appling writes:

And what about marriage? Within a decade of the tumultuous, pivotal 60s, states all across the country were passing so-called "no-fault" divorce laws, making it easy for adults to walk out of supposedly "till-death" commitments, because they aren't personally happy, fulfilled, satisfied, content, or something. In the wake, we find children struggling to make sense of it all and showing all too often in their behavior that divorce affects everyone, not just the adults who severed the vows. One of the unintended consequences of this divorce culture is that we have a growing number of adults who are co-habiting rather than getting married in this state and across the country. Children are frequently the innocent victims in these arrangements, as well. But who really cares as long as adult desires are met?

I keep saying it, but to spot a bad argument, look for declarations. No-fault divorce is bad because Appling says it is -- she offers absolutely nothing to back up her argument. It hurts kids because she says it does. I'm sure parents stuck in a loveless marriage are so much better for kids. And unmarried parents are bad for children, mostly because Appling says so. On that last one, it's really hard to think of any reason why it would be bad for kids, but there ya go.

Is this merely a Wisconsin thing? Not if we take Jim Pfaff, a spokesperson for James Dobson's Focus on the Family, at his word:

Though marriage in the majority of U.S. states is now constitutionally defined as the legal union of only one man and one woman, Focus on the Family’s Pfaff says the work for pro-family activists is far from over.

“What we need to do now is to continue to press forward to protect marriage nationwide, and then thereafter we need to strengthen marriage,” Pfaff urges. He believes that one way to do that is by reforming the nation’s no-fault divorce laws.

This is what they do. It's what they've learned from decades of fighting to eliminate abortion rights. You can't get the all out ban -- people just won't stand for it. So you eat away at the edges, limiting the right over decades, until there's nothing left but an extremely narrow liberty. There's no way that the religious right could get their idea of marriage -- the christian marriage with no exit -- enshrined in law. Not immediately, anyway. So they'll limit rights until they have what they want. They'll continue to slowly redefine marriage until the definition agrees with their world view.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; elections; Wisconsin; the religious right won't be happy with banning gay marriage -- they'll eventually want to ban divorce