Fun With Culture War Controversies

I don't post on abortion much (read: at all) on this blog, mainly because it's an issue that is impossible to debate rationally. I think I avoided talking about it in the wake of the Dr. Tiller killing by posting on it and then posting a funny video. I'm not sure, I don't check my archives much.

Anyway, I guess this post isn't about abortion per se, but about the debate around it, and it's inspired by this U.S. News article about the latest abortion reduction plan from the Obama White House:

Many abortion rights advocates and some Democrats who want to dial down the culture wars want the White House to package the two parts of the plan together, as a single piece of legislation. The plan would seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies by funding comprehensive sex education and contraception and to reduce the need for abortion by bolstering federal support for pregnant women. Supporters of the approach say it would force senators and members of Congress on both sides of the abortion battle to compromise their traditional positions, creating true common ground that mirrors what President Obama has called for.

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.

OK, I'm going to have to call bullshit on the bishops and the SBC here. You can't be pro-life and anti-contraception at the same time. You just can't. Restricting access to contraception will increase the number of abortions, whether said abortions are legal or not. That's just common sense.

Look, I'm not going to say people who oppose contraception and comprehensive sex ed don't have good reasons for doing so. The thought of young people getting it on makes a lot of folks nervous, so I understand the impulse to remove from our society things that might remind young people of sex. But such people shouldn't call themselves pro-life, because they're supporting a policy measure that will increase the number of dead fetuses.

That said (and despite my apparent anger in the preceding paragraph), I don't buy the cynical argument advanced by Amanda Marcotte that equates opposition to abortion with the desire to control female sexuality. From the religious organizations' perspective, it's the classic case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Catholic bishops and the SBC want a world where no one has sex outside of marriage and no one kills a fetus. Great. But let's be clear - that first one ain't gonna happen anytime soon. The CDC reports that 85% of women have had sex outside of marriage. Guess what? Government actions can't change that.

The same report shows that 82% of women have been on the pill - roughly the same number, and if you add patch users, implants, etc. in there you probably get to 85. Now imagine that none of these women were using birth control at the time of intercourse. Can you imagine the spike in unwanted pregnancies? And the corresponding spike in the abortion rate? That's what anti-contraception legislation would lead to, and that's what legislation encouraging contraception would combat.

So it's nice to be utopian and all, but it kind of undermines the pro-life agenda. I think it's time for pro-lifers to make a choice - push utopian ideas of morality, or reduce the number of abortions? Because you can't have it both ways.

Arnold, Hiss, Rossi

From the U.S. Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Does being an American citizen and scoring two goals for Italy in a 3-1 win over the U.S. count?

So Don't Look Back

Election day in Iran today. Good luck, Mr. Mousavi.

Update 6/13/09: Big Orange writer/Young Turk Cenk Uygur explains why A-Train's "victory" doesn't pass the smell test. Clifflyon, also at Kos, posts some digests from Farsi websites, essentially telling us that Mousavi's supporters are out burninating, Mousavi may or may not be under house arrest, and some ayatollahs are calling for a new election because this one got so effed up. It's a mess over there. Honestly, Big Orange is doing as good a job as anyone covering this.

Update 6/15/09: More from Big Orange. This guy's reporting all the rumors flying around about what's going on over there, but there isn't a whole lot of corroboration because there isn't a whole lot of information coming out of Iran right at the moment. Twitterati can follow the rumor mill as it develops by searching for #IranElection. There are significant reports that Khameini has called for an investigation, an about-face which seems to lend credence to the idea that Rafsanjani was making noise about removing him...

Update 6/16/09: Mike comments with a Post article that links to this poll that showed a hefty A-Train lead going into the poll. Problem is, though, the poll also predicted that no one was going to reach 50% and that a runoff was imminent. So a narrow A-Train victory would have been credible, but 63% still strains credulity. Also, the poll said 77% favor increased democracy (such as directly electing the Supreme Leader) and the same proportion favor increased relations with the US. So it's unlikely A-Train gets a landslide despite that, even if he is an economic populist. It's possible, but not probable, and I still think the most probable outcome is that the vote tally was fudged a bit.

The Others

The Holocaust Museum shooting has inspired The Washington Post's Michael Gerson, who freakily had a column about international Holocaust denial run on the day of the shooting, to write a piece trying to deal with anti-Semitism. It's a tough subject for anyone to tackle in a single column. Hell, it took James Carroll 700-plus pages to deal with just the Catholic Church's role in anti-Semitism. And it's fair to say that Carroll's book, which is an excellent read, just scratches the surface of the phenomenon as a whole.

Gerson quotes Museum director Sara Bloomfield, who hints at anti-Semitism's reach:

Anti-Semitism has existed with and without Christianity. With and without the right wing. With and without the left wing. With and without democracy. With and without economic problems. With and without globalization. With and without a Jewish homeland.

Gerson, predictably, concludes that anti-Semitism exists at odds with liberty. This is not a poor assessment - clearly, if you want to control someone's religious beliefs, you're not a friend of liberty. But this is interesting because it implies something more fundamental to human nature at work.

I think it's natural for people in a society to want other members of the society to conform. We like order in our societies, and look down upon those that would disrupt that order. Those that don't adhere to some extent to the line set by their society become the pariahs, the "others." And Jews? For the last 2000 years (with the exception of Khazaria in the 9th century and modern-day Israel) we have been the ultimate non-conformists. In societies built around Christianity and Islam we have stubbornly held to our beliefs and traditions. We're the world's others.

But what about in America? Certainly, if there's any non-Jewish society that has accepted Jews as part of its own, it's America, right? This is true to a great extent, and yet, Jews here are still an "other." Our holidays are weird, our customs strange, and our beliefs are poorly understood. Your average American probably couldn't tell you what Yom Kippur was, and probably still believes that the Old Testament God is vengeful and angry. These misconceptions and misunderstandings exist becaues even in America, we don't conform completely.

Which leads me back to the question of liberty. Gerson is not the first to claim this, but I'll quote him anyway:

But we do know that anti-Semitism has always been a kind of test -- a reliable measure of a nation's moral and social health. When the rights of Jews are violated, all human rights are insecure. When Jews and Jewish institutions are targeted, all minorities have reason for fear. And by this standard, America has cause for introspection.

To me, this isn't just because Jews are some sort of special canary-in-a-coal mine, but because a society's level of liberty can be judged by the rights it affords its "others," and Jews are the most common "others" in Western and Islamic societies over the past couple thousand years. America has dealt well with us as "others," and through its guarantees of religious liberty, has let us participate fully in American society. What's more, American society has accepted us to some extent, not fully understanding us but at least dealing well with us.

So in modern America there are groups that are far more otherized than the Jews. Atheists and gays come to mind immediately. It's nice to say that we should resist otherizing groups altogether, and that's certainly true, but good luck with that. We'll eventually accept atheists and gays into the fabric of American society in the way America brought the Jews in, but someone else will take their place in the role of pariahs. And what's more, people with narrow perceptions of American society will continue to rail against "others," be they Jews or what have you. Resisting this is noble. But it should be our goal, first and foremost, to ensure that even the groups most marginalized by our mainstream society are treated equally by our government and our laws.

Shooting in Downtown DC

Some asshat shoots up the Holocaust Museum. Three people shot - no word from the Post yet on their condition. Scary stuff.

Update: Just two shot - the guard and the gunman, who shot each other. Freaky coincidence: this Gerson op-ed ran today.

Update 2: The above Post article has been updated with the perp's name: James W. von Brunn. Aravosis thinks he found the guy: some cranky old white supremacist dude.

Hey, Free Money!

Congratulations to the North Pacific nation of Palau, who just used Americans' irrational fear of 17 Chinese Uighur separatists to bilk us out of 200 million smackeroos. Of course, it would have cost us a fraction of that to grant them asylum (they would have been killed if they went back to China) and resettled them in, say, Raleigh.

But that would have been logical, and I don't think most people are thinking with the logical bits of their brain when it comes to Gitmo detainees. So congratulations, you just got us scammed by Palau because you're scared shitless for no good reason. Good job, you just more than doubled Palau's GDP.

Two final notes. We had already released a few of the Uighurs to Albania before they decided to stop under pressure from Beijing. How pissed off are those guys now? I mean, they end up in a depressing post-communist Balkan country and their friends are in a country that's basically a giant resort? Talk about a raw deal. Second, Palau is dependent on the U.S. for pretty much everything, to the point where Palauan citizens don't need a visa to come here for work or to live. So if Palau gives them citizenship, they can come and live here whenever they want.

More on Sotomayor

The ACLU has written an insanely extensive report on Sotomayor's judicial history. I didn't read the whole thing - it's 88 pages, ferchrissakes - but I'm sure it's interesting if you have the time. From the bits I skimmed, it looks like a mixed bag. During the national security section, they talk a lot about her deference to the federal government, which is disturbing - but they also point out that she joined an opinion which struck down the National Security Letter gag rule, which is good.

RIP Exclusionary Rule (1961-2009)

In legal circles, the exclusionary rule is the rule that forbids prosecutors from bringing evidence to trial that is acquired via an illegal search or seizure. The Supreme Court has been chipping away at it in recent years, but with a tenuous five-justice majority opposed to it, it's managed to hold on for a while, kinda like a terminally ill patient who just keeps rallying.

But if this LA Times article is any indication, Obama just pulled the plug with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor:

In two major rulings after she joined the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in 1998, she held that evidence could be used to convict a defendant even though police had violated his rights in seizing it. Sotomayor said that because the police and prosecutors acted "in good faith," the evidence need not be thrown out.

In 1999, Sotomayor upheld the crack cocaine conviction of a New York man despite what she called a "mistaken arrest." Last year, Sotomayor spoke for a 2-1 majority that upheld a man's child pornography conviction, even though she agreed an FBI agent did not have probable cause to search his computer.

This is unwelcome news for more than one reason. First, of course, it dooms the exclusionary rule - now there's a six-justice majority in favor of repeal, which means that Kennedy can wander off the reservation and Mapp could still be overturned. This means that cops can break the Fourth Amendment all they damn well please and it won't matter a bit, which basically renders the "illegal search and seizure" clause null and void, at least with respect to state prosecutions.

Second, it hints at Sotomayor's deference to executive and police power that is dangerous in terms of war on terror issues. Souter was a pretty solid vote in favor of maintaining due process in terrorism cases, and Kennedy - the swing vote - tended to side with the liberals. Now, there'll be a solid five-justice majority (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Sotomayor) who are not willing to exercise judicial power to maintain the rule of law. And that's dangerous.

(Via Brayton.)

OK, SCOTUS Nerds, Your Help Please

Not entirely sure what this means:

The Supreme Court ruled moments ago that Chrysler cannot yet sell most of its assets to Fiat, a move that has been opposed by three Indiana state pension and construction funds.

The ruling grants a stay in the sale as the court gathers more data and schedules a hearing on the matter.

It temporarily blocks the way for Chrysler to complete its merger with the Italian automaker and begin its new, post-bankruptcy life.

Ginsburg issued the stay, and didn't give a reason for doing so.

What does this mean? Is the Supreme Court about to consider ruling this government participation in private enterprise unconstitutional, and send us back to the Lochner era? Is this a takings case that the pension funds are filing, arguing that the government is forcing them to give up their Chrysler stock to the UAW and Fiat, and if so, why the hell would you file that suit if your other option is losing all of your stock in bankruptcy proceedings? I don't ask for much, SCOTUS watchers. Just tell me what all this is about.

Dooles (ptui)

I don't know why, but this made me laugh way too much.

What's In A Name?

Bizarre polling results are nothing new - just ask the Kerry pollster that thought he won Arkansas in 2004. Usually there are easy explanations, like a screwed-up sample, poor weighting, bad questioning, etc. That said, I have no idea what to make of this poll. A few notes:

- Only 40% of Americans think gay people should be allowed to marry. 59% of 18-29s do, however.

- 73% of people think gay couples should have inheritance rights. 67% of people think gay couples should have health insurance and employee benefits. 54% of people think gay people should be allowed to adopt (a majority, but still a shockingly low number).

- 40% of people still think gay sex should be illegal. (And what's up with that graph? Did America take a collective stupid pill in the late-'80s?)

- 69% of people think gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military. The same percentage thinks they should be allowed to teach children. (I would be shocked by that last number, except that I just saw Milk the other night and I realize that only 30 years ago it took damn near a miracle to convince Californians to prevent an anti-gay witch hunt in the schools. So quite the improvement, there.)

These numbers are all fun to quote by themselves, but put together, they make absolutely no sense. A majority of Americans support the constituent parts of gay marriage, but only 40% support gay marriage? Huh? Does that mean that at least 14% of Americans support gay marriage and just don't know it yet?

I think it's more likely that Americans don't know what gay marriage is. I have a feeling that most Americans still think of civil marriage as more than just a legal agreement between consenting adults. As such, we still are unable to have an honest debate on this issue, since because of this failure to understand the limitations of civil marriage, religious babble gets drawn into an argument where is has no place.

What's even more confusing is the idea that support for gay civil rights appears to be hanging around in the high 60s, but support for gay people being allowed to do the thing that makes them gay is in the high 50s. Shouldn't support for the freedom of gay people to do whatever they want behind closed doors be higher than support for gay civil rights? I really don't understand how this works. My suspicion is that something about the question is loaded or unclear. If not, though, my fear is that people support civil rights in the abstract, but their support wanes when confronted with the fact that full civil rights means that activities they personally find icky would have to be legal.

In fact, is there really anything else beyond the "icky" factor driving this debate? I have yet to see an argument opposing gay rights that doesn't boil down to "ewww, that's icky." And far too many people think that ickiness ought to be a factor in our legislative process. (See: smoking bans, trans-fat bans, prohibition laws, yadda yadda yadda.)

Good Thing Lucy Wasn't Involved

I could post today on the murder of George Tiller and what that means, but a blog post about abortion is a Godwin waiting to happen. I'll just say my condolences to the Tiller family and leave it at that.

Instead, here's a hilarious video of Charlie Brown throwing out a first pitch at a Pirates game. Enjoy.

More Funny

...this time, it's baseball related.

Yes, I know the Internet facts meme has been overplayed like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" during the early '90s, but here's what makes this so funny: Wieters hasn't played a game in the major leagues yet. His first game with the O's is tonight. And yet he's the Orioles fans' Jesus. Not sure whether this says more about Wieters or the desperation of Orioles fans. (Of course, on the off chance Wieters doesn't suck, wouldn't a lineup of Roberts, Jones, Markakis, Huff, and Wieters scare the crap out of most AL pitchers?)

Either this is a desperate cry of hope or a hilarious parody of the massive hype around a 22-year-old prospect, and I'm banking on the latter. That said, the crying Chuck Norris pic (scroll down a little, it's in the background of a box on the right) really makes the site.

Quack?

OK, this video is just hilarious.

Hey Now, That Music Is Pretty Creepy

I'm really starting to like Rachel Maddow. She's basically a coherent, less manic, far more likable version of Olbermann. Here's her hilarious bit on the Senate vote to keep Gitmo open.

I Win

It's Sotomayor.

I totally called it. You may now stand in awe before my prognostication abilities.

Also, fuck you, Jeffrey Rosen.

Wait, Defense Contract Reform?

So somehow this little piece of legislation got lost in the shuffle and signed into law without anyone really noticing. It seeks to provide the President and Secretary of Defense greater oversight of weapons contracting, especially with respect to cost control, and ensures that competitive bidding exists at all stages of the weapons procurement process. It also starts to fight conflicts of interest in the contracting process, something that runs rampant in the cozy world of defense contracts. It's not the major overhaul the system needs, but it's something, and it'll probably save us a few billion - probably more than the cost cuts Obama asked for from discretionary spending.

So why did no one pick up on this that I saw?

U.S. Constitution (1791-2009)

Shorter Obama: Bush spent eight years ripping the Constitution and the rule of law to shreds. I will now light the remaining shreds on fire, bury their ashes, and stomp on their grave. That is all.

Cue Greenwald's predictably awesome rant here. He makes the excellent point that Obama's system of dealing with detainees basically rigs the outcome in the government's favor. If we can get a conviction, use the courts. If we can't get a conviction in the courts, use a military kangaroo court. If we can't even get a conviction there, don't bother with the courts and just throw them in jail anyway. That's some catch, that Catch-22.

What baffles me is that the Obama administration isn't even considering the possibility that Bush made a mistake by putting some of these people in Gitmo in the first place, and that there might - gasp - be innocent people there. So Obama's saying that Bush screwed up in every conceivable way except that he was perfect in choosing who to detain? I find that hard to believe. So do these people.

Greenwald has an embedded video of Rachel Maddow's take, where she makes the obvious Minority Report reference that, for some reason, everyone else has missed. Charlie Savage explains how this could tie into the SCOTUS appointment, and why the nomination of Elena Kagan would be at least a partial disaster while the nomination of Diane Wood would be a good thing.

In Which My Head Explodes

This afternoon when I came home, I thought I felt a draft coming from below. "Weird," I thought. "It must be kinda cold down there." Then I opened up an e-mail that Jacob sent me, and I understood why:

Admitting that it may be “political suicide” former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said its time to consider legalizing drugs.

Yep. Tancredo and I agree on something controversial. Hell is freezing over, kids.

Greenwald FTW

In response to idiot Democratic senators caving to the Republican talking points that Gitmo terror suspects shouldn't be kept in the American jails that are good enough to hold Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski, and Omar Abdel-Rahman, Greenwald says:

There's no more mewling, craven, subservient entity in the United States than the Senate Democratic caucus.

Harsh... and yet so true.

Think Before You Regulate

Jacob posts this interesting article about the unintended consequences of do-gooder legislation, in this case the toy safety act passed in 2008. Seems it's threatening small makers of hand-crafted toys who can't possibly afford to test all their toys before selling them.

I probably disagree with the author and with Jacob when I say that it's not an argument against regulation per se. Rather, it's an argument against hurriedly passing regulations without fully understanding the effect it will have on everyone under the law's jurisdiction. In general, it seems that the quality of legislation is inversely proportional to the speed with which it gets through Congress...

Hate Crimes Legislation

Lot of hate blogging all of a sudden. Weird.

Anyway, the Senate will soon be taking up S. 909, which adds gender identity and sexual orientation to the list of groups protected by existing hate crimes legislation. Which, like every other piece of legislation related to gay rights, brings out the crazies. Most of the opposition to this bill is somewhat disingenuous - since the bill only adds to the list of protected classes in current hate crimes legislation, the concept of "hate crimes" is not really at issue here, and it seems only logical that if we're going to have "hate crimes" be a class of crime, crimes committed out of hatred towards gay people ought to fall under that category. And the bizarre argument I hear the most against S. 909 (also called the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act after the gay Laramie, Wyo. resident beaten to death because of his sexuality in 1998) is that the legislation will somehow make hatred of gay people, or denunciation of homosexuality by churches, a prosecutable offense. This is a patently absurd argument - for something to be a hate crime, it must first be a crime, and usually a violent one. Unless preaching is outlawed, anti-gay preachers have nothing to worry about.

(To be fair, I've heard some weird arguments from the left as well, mostly along the lines of accusing detractors of being in favor of beating up gay people. Last time I checked, beating anyone up is illegal, and would remain that way even if S. 909 fails.)

Wackos notwithstanding, though, there are some good arguments from both supporters and detractors of hate crime legislation in general. It is these arguments I want to look at.

The main argument against hate crime legislation is that it punishes a perpetrator for the thoughts in their head as opposed to their actions. Bigotry is distasteful, of course, but it's hardly illegal, nor should it be. Moreover, punishing someone more for committing a crime out of hate is tantamount to adding prison time for "thoughtcrime," which is not the American way. This is a reasonable argument - we should avoid punishing people for their thoughts.

It is, however, a spurious argument - we already, in many cases, make sentencing decisions based on the perpetrator's thoughts. Is the perp remorseful? If so, he'll probably get a shorter sentence. Ditto if the motive behind the crime was noble (say he robbed a bank in order to pay for Mom's medical bills). These are ad hoc jury/judge decisions of course, but they are frequently codified. If you kill someone, for example, the thoughts in your head are extremely important in determining the crime you committed and the sentence you receive. Did you do it on accident (involuntary manslaughter)? Did you try to hurt someone but not kill them (manslaughter)? Did you want to kill them but do so as a "crime of passion" (second-degree murder)? Did you plan out the whole thing (first-degree murder)? It's not a huge leap to go from here to "did you kill him out of race/sexuality/religion/gender hatred?"

The question, then, is why should we make that distinction? What is it about hate crimes that makes them worth differentiating? The argument is that a hate crime isn't just a crime against another person but a crime aimed at an entire group of people. It's an act of terrorism, so to speak - the goal of the perpetrator is not just to beat up some gay dude but to force all gay people to accept their supposed subordinate status in the social order. Therefore, the crime is more pernicious than just a simple beating, and ought to be punished as such.

The fact is that we punish crimes based on their effect on society already. We punish manslaughter less than murder because the latter has a far more deleterious effect on society than the former. In a case like a hate crime where the negative effect on society is multiplied by the perp's motive, it just makes sense to punish the crime more.

The other argument against federal hate crimes legislation is that it gives to the federal government powers that ought to remain in state hands. Why should a hate crime be a federal issue but a regular crime be a state issue? That's a good point, but there is a role for the federal government here since (as I mentioned earlier) an attack on a gay man anywhere is in essence a crime against gay people around the country. But a federal prosecution seems uncouth, since the crime itself probably did not take place across state lines (like kidnapping or trafficking, say). I would restrict the federal government's role in hate crimes prosecutions to a strictly advisory and assisting role. This lets states take the lead in their own law enforcement, while allowing the feds to step in to help if necessary.

Astute observers will note that I've "flip-flopped" on this issue in the past few years. So I'll reiterate that I reserve the right to change my position on any issue at any time, for any logical reason, so there.

Yep, Hate Still Exists

I saw a swastika painted on a road sign.

Not a big thing, mind you. More of a scrawl than a painting, tucked in a corner of a road sign on southbound Reedy Creek Road in Cary. It's still there, as of this writing. It's been there for about three days now. I didn't take a picture - no point in holding up traffic.

You don't see those much, around here. We in the Triangle are blessed with a rather tolerant community. The three places I've lived for significant periods of time - Northern Virginia, Nashville, and Raleigh - are so welcoming in general that I can honestly say I've never actually experienced any real anti-Semitism. Quite a difference from my mom's family, who weren't allowed to join Pine Bluff (Ark.) Country Club because of their religion. In the past forty years or so, hatred towards Jews and non-whites has faded into social unacceptability...

But, as that road sign chicken-scratch reminded me, it still exists. It's out there in the rantings of people like Pittsburgh shooter Andrew Poplawski. It's out there among the crazy bastards in North Idaho and on Stormfront. And it's out there in some punk with a can of spray-paint on Reedy Creek.

On April 21, Jews commemorated Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance of the crimes symbolized by that swastika. We swear to never forget... but let's face it, folks, we have forgotten, at least until some halfwit scribbles something on a road sign and we're forced to think about what that symbol really means.

Because we've seen the symbol, we've heard the word "Nazi," entirely too much over the past few years. You go to a protest and you see signs like this. Or this. We throw around slogans comparing Bush to Hitler or calling Obama a fascist, as if we could imagine either of those men slaughtering eleven million innocent people in cold blood simply because he didn't like who they were. The swastika and the word "Nazi" aren't symbols of the ultimate evil of hatred and murder and genocide anymore - they're rhetorical shorthands for policies with which we disagree. And that means we have forgotten.

But it's worse. Not only have we forgotten, it means there's no point in remembering anymore. If we're referencing Nazism and the Holocaust to talk about differences in domestic and foreign policy, how the hell could we invoke the memories of the victims of genocide where it really matters, in cases like Darfur, or the budding anti-gay massacres in Iraq?

Maybe it's just the intellectually lazy fringe who have lost all perspective on the Holocaust, and that most people understand what it means to invoke Hitler and the Nazis. But those fringe idiots make us so afraid to do it when it's warranted, so cynical when it comes to such references that when murderous hate and political power converge and genocide threatens, our first reaction when the Holocaust is referenced is dismissal and derision.

So why does it behoove all of us to condemn, in no uncertain terms, the wanton use of references to fascism and Nazism in our everyday political discourse? Because hate still exists. Because we need to preserve the memory of Hitler's victims for cases when that memory might be useful in stopping actual genocide. And because I don't know what that punk on Reedy Creek Road was thinking about when he scrawled that swastika, but I doubt it was the income tax.

A Question

Isn't it funny how those who yell the loudest for the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" strategy of law enforcement are suddenly perfectly okay with lawbreaking if it's done by the executive branch?

Bonus question for Republicans only: which is worse, lying about cheating on your wife or torturing?

Massive Judicial Fail

Some stupid people north of the border decided to celebrate a "Kick a Ginger Day" where high-school students would kick a red-headed fellow students. The perpetrators are, of course, brought to justice, where the presiding judge blames... South Park?

Judge Lynn Cook-Stanhope said on Friday she was satisfied the teenagers had taken responsibility for their actions, and she saved her scathing remarks for the animated television show South Park, which she called a "vulgar, socially irreverent program that contributes nothing to society."

Unfortunately, the writers and producers of the show will never be called to account for encouraging such action, the judge added.

Okay, dumbshit, the "Ginger Kids" episode that the judge clearly thinks caused this whole incident is a work of art that cannot be seen as having any influence over a bunch of idiot kids in Calgary. Which ought to be clear from the fact that the episode's message is the exact opposite of what these idiot kids did. The "writers and producers" of South Park didn't "encourag[e] such action," they ACTIVELY DISCOURAGED IT. Watch the damn show.

Maybe she's still bitter over the whole "Blame Canada" thing. Which was also sarcastic. Screw it, I'm gonna go try to find "Ginger Kids" online somewhere.

Update: Watch it here.