Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
Actually, that title is misleading. To be perfectly accurate, it should read "House Votes To Not Deny Themselves A Raise," but then you get into the whole annoy-English-teachers-with-a-double-negative thing.
Now, there really is only one candidate for becoming the 51st state: Puerto Rico. Ignoring deluded fantasies of splitting either California or Texas into multiple new states, and ignoring also the perennial push to declare the District of Columbia a state; Puerto Rico is really the only viable candidate. All the other territories (mostly islands in the Pacific) simply don't have enough people living in them.
. . . The mainstream media had lots of fun with the Pentagon funding a "gay bomb" and other fantastical projects last week (and the late night talk show hosts had even more fun with it). The fact that the Pentagon funds some wacky projects shouldn't actually come as news to anyone familiar with the story of the "hafnium bomb" -- an idea for a grenade-sized nuke that has about as much evidence of ever becoming reality as cold fusion.
I guess I really shouldn't mock the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), too much, since they're also the folks who brought us the very internet you are reading this on. See? Some of their stuff turns out OK.
It should be pointed out that it's not often you get to read the phrase (even with brackets): "bong hits [are a good thing]" in a Supreme Court decision.
My personal opinion is that (1) Bush isn't going to fire Gonzales, because he's terrified of trying to get a replacement through the Senate confirmation process, and therefore he's happy to have a broken and ineffectual Justice Department for the remainder of his term; and (2) I don't think he's going to pardon Libby. I think a respite or even a commutation might indeed be in the cards, but not an actual pardon. As I've stated before, I do think it's going to be an agonizing political calculation for the White House, though. I could be wrong, especially about that second one, but that's the way I see it.
As I said before, no surprises there. When the Justice Department is given a tool usually reserved to absolute monarchs such as Louis XVI (see my earlier post about lettres de cachet and the similarities between the Bush administration and the regime that was deposed in the French Revolution), the chances are good that they're going to abuse it.
Remember, this is why we wrote our Constitution, to protect citizens from such abuse.
President Bush really and truly wanted to exercise this option with Libby -- and he's still probably hoping mightily that the judge lets Scooter stay out of jail for another year and a half (while his appeal is being heard) -- so that Bush can pardon him after the 2008 election. But, unfortunately, the judge involved has gained the reputation of being a "long ball" judge (another baseball metaphor pops up!), consistently ruling "by the book," and thereby bucking the modern trend of letting white-collar criminals stay free on appeal. If all predictions are accurate and the judge orders Scooter to jail before the end of the summer, Bush is going to be forced to make this decision a lot more quickly than he would have liked.
I'm talking, of course, about immigration. The problem with the Bush approach is that (for once) they are desperately trying to talk intelligently about solving a problem with real solutions and wonky policy talking points. Their opponents (from within their own party) have a much blunter and more effective weapon, since they have "framed" the issue down to one word -- the dreaded "amnesty." Anything short of rounding up all 12 million illegal aliens and promptly shipping them back to where they came from is howlingly derided as the A-word. Never mind the fact that this would be patently impossible to achieve, anyone proposing any other answer to the problem is met with the oh-so-effective "Amnesty! Amnesty! Amnesty!" chorus.
Do you support the concept of gay marriage?
That used to be an unimaginable question. Not "unimaginable" in a negative sense, but "unimaginable" in the original, neutral definition of the word: "unable to be imagined," or "not imaginable." The concept of two people of the same sex being married wasn't even raised in the American conscience until the 1990s (or perhaps late 1980s -- I haven't researched the actual date, this is from my own recollection). After that point, of course, the idea has grown in prominence in the American political debate, both pro and con.
But now, mostly due to a Mormon running for president, the issue of polygamy is also inserting itself into the political debate. So the question must also be asked: Do you support the concept of polygamy? If so, why? If not, why not?
Because naming an Independent Counsel to investigate the Bush White House means giving them unlimited power to investigate anything and everything they feel like (which is how Ken Starr went from Whitewater and Vince Foster to blowjobs in the White House). An Independent Counsel's investigation could be the first step towards impeachment -- and maybe not just of Gonzales.
So if Senator Specter turns out to be wrong and Gonzales isn't putting his diplomas and his coffee cup into moving boxes this week, then Democrats need to immediately up the stakes. And all it will take for Bush to fold is hearing those three powerful words: "Independent Counsel Law."