celebrity intimate by proxy

the talking dog, who is clearly much cooler than I, interviews Dick Morris, who said some things that surprised me. Go look.

I was a little surprised that he let his posts named after Beatles songs thing go for this one, but Morris probably wouldn't have been best pleased with a toejam footballs reference.

yikes.

To The Barricades has a detailed post on Enron and California and how energy companies will save literally billions of dollars if a friendly California governor refuses to make them pay it back.

smile

Emma tells us how her garden grows, and packs to come to New York in the spring so she can do mine too, because she's always had a tendresse for futons.

oh, OK, maybe they should recall him over this

the Schwarzenegger campaign revealed today that Ahnuld's female troubles are all Grey Davis' fault.

As they say in AA, did he put the woman in your hand?

a jaundiced eye on Ahnuld from the pinkos at the New York Post

Apparently Rupert (and, presumably, the very, very young lady who is the lucky mother of his latest child) doesn't approve of Ahnuld's behavior.

Or, you know, maybe it's just that the conservatives want California back to lose in. Better to rule in hell and all that.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and more than 5,000 of his fans descended on the state Capitol yesterday, as the actor-turned-candidate tried to lift himself out of a quagmire of sexual-misconduct allegations with just one day to go before the recall vote

Fifteen women have told the Los Angeles Times that the world-famous actor touched them inappropriately.

Schwarzenegger issued a blanket apology for his past offensive behavior with women, but has denied several of the specific charges.

Gov. Gray Davis, meanwhile, stuck to his guns and the Democratic strategy of trying to woo female voters away from Schwarzenegger.

"We're talking about seriously mistreating 15 women in situations that, if true, would be a crime," Davis told CNN's "Larry King Live" last night.

"So clearly, he's disturbed people.

"We've not heard a forthright response from him. There have been some evasions, occasionally an apology, occasionally a denial. The question gets down to this: Are all 15 of these women lying, or is Arnold Schwarzenegger not telling us the truth?"

Schwarzenegger, pressed about the specifics of the sexual accusations, promised Tom Brokaw on last night's "Dateline NBC" that he'll set the record straight, but not until after tomorrow's vote.

"As soon as the campaign is over I will; I can get into all of the specifics and find out what is really going on, but right now, I'm just really occupied with the campaign," he said.

Davis ripped Schwarzenegger, saying, "To not deal with that controversy before the election is denying the voters pretty important information. I think many of them are going to find it insulting."

During the Sacramento rally, an upbeat Schwarzenegger made no mention of "puke politics" or dirty campaigning, as he's done countless times since the charges erupted.

The would-be Governator got a rock boost from Long Island native Dee Snider, frontman for '80s metal band Twisted Sister. Snider sang the group's signature song "We're Not Gonna Take It," which Schwarzenegger's camp has adopted as its theme.

At one point, Schwarzenegger grabbed a guitar and strummed along.

"We have to clean house; we're here to sweep out the special interests, and we're here, No. 1, to sweep out Gray Davis!" said Schwarzenegger, brandishing a broom.


and parenthetically: Dee Snider?

Damn, doesn't he have a 401k? No-one needs money that badly.

edit: Hey, I forgot the hed. You're gonna love this.

ARNOLD GROPES FOR FINAL STRATEGY

hm.

the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has this to say about Roy Moore:

...Actually, Moore has made two different arguments that need to be addressed. First, he has asserted that the federal appeals court did not have the constitutional authority to order him to remove the Ten Commandments display because it said he was violating the First Amendment's "establishment clause," and the First Amendment does not apply to state government, only to Congress. This is an argument that has been made before and is an intriguing legal theory, but it has been rejected by federal courts, including the Supreme Court, for about a century.

The Supreme Court has been ruling for at least that long that the "equal-protection" clause of the Constitution's 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) applies all the Bill of Rights prohibitions against federal-government action to state and local governments as well. Moore and others may disagree, but the institution given the authority to adjudicate the issue, the Supreme Court, has ruled for numerous decades that the First Amendment must apply to state and local governments.

Attorneys consistently are winning free-exercise-of-religion cases against state governments and county zoning commissions by going into federal court and arguing that the First Amendment's protection against government "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion applies not just to Congress, but to government at all levels. If the Supreme Court were to reverse itself and agree with Moore that the First Amendment applies only to Congress, Christians and other people of faith would be at the mercy of zoning commissions telling them they could not have Bible studies above a certain size in their own homes (a Connecticut case) or how many worship services and what maximum attendance would be allowed to ease traffic concerns (a case in the Pacific Northwest).

Moore's second argument, that he had an obligation to obey a higher law and acknowledge God through his Ten Commandments display, even when a federal court - however misguided - has ruled otherwise, deals directly with the issue of when it is justifiable to defy court orders.

Jesus said we are to "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" (Matthew 22:21). The Apostle Paul enjoined every person to "be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1). The Apostle Peter calls us to "Submit [our]selves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake" (I Peter 2:13). Is nonviolent civil disobedience ever acceptable? Yes it is, in extreme circumstances, if God is to remain sovereign. Francis Schaeffer put it succinctly in A Christian Manifesto (1981): "One either confesses that God is the final authority, or one confesses that Caesar is Lord."

Yes, there may well come a time - when legal redress of grievance has been exhausted - that individual Christians may feel compelled by conscience to disobey unjust laws through nonviolent civil disobedience, obey God rather than man and willingly face the legal consequences for such nonviolent protests. Two excellent examples in Alabama's history are Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. King was arrested for protesting segregation laws in Birmingham and Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery.

There are some who have compared Moore's action with those of King and Parks. However, there are two critically important differences. First, King and Parks were part of a disenfranchised class of African-Americans that systematically was prohibited from voting in the Alabama of the 1950s and the early 1960s. The threshold for civil disobedience is lowered substantially when you are denied the right to legal redress of grievance through the ballot. Moore not only can vote, he is the highest elected judicial official in the Alabama state government and was far from having exhausted his legal appeal process through the courts.

Second, Moore is not a private citizen like King and Parks. When a government official defies a court order with which he disagrees, you are dealing with a very different challenge to the rule of law than when an individual engages in nonviolent civil disobedience. When a government official takes it upon himself to decide which legal authority he is going to acknowledge and which he isn't, then you have a direct challenge, not of a law but of the rule of law.

The United States is a government founded on the rule of law, not of men. If we disagree with a judicial interpretation of the law (which makes it the legal authority until it is reversed, or the law is changed) then we must change the judges and, if necessary, change the laws.

What we must not do, unless we want to abandon the rule of law and take a huge step toward anarchy and rebellion, is support defiance of legal authority by officials sworn to uphold the law...

roll the vote

Rather, the faith that drives the Schwarzenegger campaign is the faith that he is what he says he is -- a fiscal conservative and upright family man -- despite all sorts of evidence to the contrary. Outside Team Arnold, there is plenty of skepticism on both fronts. Conservatives worry that he's too much like George Bush I, or even worse: a candidate who will win office as a fiscal conservative but then wind up raising their taxes. Liberals worry that he's too much like George Bush II: someone who will campaign as a social moderate only to become a tool of the hardcore religious right.

And in the middle, there are people like Kerry Martello and Carol Stanley. Martello is a 22-year-old college student who has volunteered to work on the Schwarzenegger campaign. Asked last week why she supports Schwarzenegger, she cited his open-mindedness, "his willingness to look at California as a business, his new and innovative ways to make it work." What are some of those new and innovative ways"? "Well," Martello said, "treating the state like a business. He says you can save, you know, millions of dollars if you just run it like a business."

Stanley, a somewhat older Schwarzenegger fan from Sacramento, turned out to see her candidate at the march on the Capitol Sunday. Asked about her support for Schwarzenegger, she said: "I like what he stands for. I think he's going to get the power back to the people; maybe we'll get to do what we want with our money instead of the government making all of the decisions for us." Pressed for a specific Schwarzenegger policy position she likes, she said: "It would be better if you talked to my husband."


via Body and Soul

headline of the day

Texas Primary Probably Faces Delay


as what in Texas does not.

According to Off the Kuff, redistricting headquarters on the left web, the Republicans have passed their "drop-dead deadline," so they're taking a nice break (an option, parenthetically, that they did not offer to their observant jewish colleagues over the weekend) and coming back Wed.

I'm sensing that the elephants are somewhat conflicted about the importance of deadlines.

Of course, that was just just about the right to have one's vote for president counted and to have the elected president serve.

This is about Midland.

There's a role for perspective in these things.

Thank goodness the thugs in Dockers are all busy in the jobs Bush gave them. I don't want to think about what would happen to them if they tried that shit in Texas.

Mostly because it would really mess with my karma.

ascended letter office

via skimble:

After Bush policies bring about the End Times, his faith-based constituencies will disappear from the earth via The Rapture.

Thanks to a new service called Rapture Letters, they will be able to send free email from their privileged positions in heaven to the rest of us infidels left behind.


How would this work, you may ask?


After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won't listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?

We have written a computer program to do just that. It will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven.

If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture. Then they will receive another letter every friday after that.

This rapture letter service is FREE and will hopefully gain the person you send it to an eternity in heaven.


Just makes you want to cry, what NASA lost when these people rejected science.

Molly, who I love

...Back in 2001, Cheney had said it was "pretty well confirmed" that Iraq and the Sept. 11 hijackers had coordinated. But most recently he said he didn't know if Saddam was connected to Sept. 11.

Spain, which supported the United States in the war with Iraq and has been active in prosecuting al Qaeda, reported "no link to al Qaeda." A high-ranking German intelligence official said talk of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection is "nonsense" and "not even the American intelligence community believes that anymore."

In August, the National Journal reported on three former Bush national security officials who had said that "the prewar evidence tying al Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies."

Greg Thielmann, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said intelligence confirmed that Saddam and al Qaeda were "mortal enemies." Osama bin Laden often denounced Saddam as "an infidel."

Guess someone forgot to tell the president and the vice president.

The one known connection between Iraq and al Qaeda is that for a time an al Qaeda operative was in Baghdad, presumably up to no good, although we have no evidence.

Uh, there were 18 al Qaeda operatives lurking in this country -- does that make us guilty of harboring terrorists?

According to the Los Angeles Times, the classified section of a congressional report about 9-11 details "a Saudi government that not only provided significant money and aid to the suicide hijackers but also allowed potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to flow to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups through support charities and other fronts."

That was the part of the congressional report that we were not allowed to read, despite vigorous protests from committee members...


Along those lines, Mark Kleiman points out an interesting career move by a former saudi resident of the US:


One of the Saudi paymasters for Wahhabbist missionary work in the U.S. just happened to sleep in the same hotel as three of the 9-11 hijackers the night before the attack. When the FBI tried to interview him, he faked a seizure to get out of it. An FBI agent's recommendation that he not be allowed to leave the country was mysteriously not acted on, and he flew back to Saudi Arabia September 19. Five months later the Saudi government put him in charge of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet's Mosque, which means he helps run the kingdom's charities. [*] Strange world, isn't it?


Indeed.

Heh.

but... he was Easy Reader, too

Pat Robertson seconds Rush:


"He started off playing a chauffeur in 'Driving Miss Daisy,' and then they elevated him to head of the CIA, and then they elevated him to president and in his last role they made him God. I just wonder, isn't Rush Limbaugh right to question the fact, is he that good an actor or not?"


You know, I saw Morgan Freeman do Taming of the Shrew in the park, and I can personally testify that he's a damn sight closer to the muse than Robertson is to God.

Racist (owner of the coopted media that bows down low before political correctness) fuckhead.

From the artistically sensitive party that brought you Ahnuld.

via atrios