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Via O'Reilly Radar:

"After nearly a full day spent on the Senate floor, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) defeated an attempt to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform legislation that would grant immunity to telecommunications companies who cooperated with the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program. Dodd objected to the motion to proceed to the bill early this morning and remained on the floor for almost ten hours, taking a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution with his statements throughout the day. At approximately 7:30 P.M. Majority Leader Reid announced the FISA reform bill would be pulled from the Senate calendar and reconsidered in January."

Coverage: Wired News, The EFF, AP, New York Times.

Compare that with Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, who seem to want to make America in the image of Stalinist Russia.

No wonder Ron Paul is turning heads in wingnut-oz. And elsewheres. (Analysis.)

The party of Barry Goldwater is dead.

Via Captain's Quarters:

It's their community, of course, and they set the rules. However, this doesn't hurt Paul's credibility as much as it does Redstate's. While Paul's supporters tend towards the annoying and repetitive, they have less impact because we can easily engage them and counter their arguments. Banning them simply for their support for a candidate seems more like an admission that Redstate lacks that ability.

I'm no Paul supporter by any means. However, Paul's statements can be addressed and rebutted fairly easily, at least those with which I strongly disagree. I don't fear the commenters nor the debate, even if it does grow tiresome at times. It certainly can't be any more tiresome than the S-CHIP debate, or the Iraq War debate, or the FISA debate -- and I'd have less sympathy for opponents on those issues than the people who support Ron Paul.

Having been to the CLC, I disagree with Leon's assumption that these Paul supporters are all or mostly cryptoliberals. Plenty of libertarian-leaning Republicans exist in the party, along with the former Buchananites and isolationists of the GOP. Instead of cutting these people off, it might be better for Redstate to keep engaging them.

Yes, the small-government advocates should be tolerated in the party of neo-fascism. Dismiss their arguments for fiscal responsibility.

Even though Ron Paul is a social conservative, as ready to invite Big Brother into the livingrooms and bedrooms of Americans as any gold-star Republican, his name is mud in mainstream Republican circles.

Why?

Maybe follow the money. This is the new face of conservatism.

(P.S. - I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, either. Far be it! But compared to all the other Republican candidates, he's a fucking saint!)

Fascinating.

Brazilian and Argentine paleontologists have discovered the largely complete fossil of a new species of giant dinosaur which roamed what is now northern Patagonia about 80 million years ago.

This is bad news for Republicans, because, as we all know, dinosaurs are godless liberals for having existed outside of the Dominionist-approved interpretations of the scriptures.

Too bad this comes too late for Tim Russert find another opportunity to assert his pointlessness and ask the Democratic presidential candidates what their favorite dinosaur is?

...do you think the nutroots would stop plugging their ears and shouting "nah nah nah nah nah nah nah"?

Oh, probably not. It's that godless science that's the problem, right?

Credit where credit is due: Captain's Quarters rightly (heh) comes out against yet more government power eroding Constitutional rights:

While some conservatives undoubtedly would argue that they see nothing wrong with giving law-enforcement agencies access to existing technology, others will rightly object on two grounds. First, the obvious application for the sneak-peek technology would be to avoid search warrants. If probable cause existed for a warrant, law enforcement wouldn't need the satellite technology; they'd simply enter. That's the way it's supposed to work, and has worked well for over 200 years. Civil liberty is based in part on judicial oversight of law enforcement encroachment on private property, which the sneak-peek technology would obliterate.

Second and perhaps more importantly, American legal tradition has separated military and foreign-intel collection from domestic law enforcement, and for good reasons. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the military (except the Coast Guard, for certain purposes) from acting in a law-enforcement role, except under emergencies specifically requiring martial law. This law keeps the federal government from usurping power from local and state authorities. Since these satellites were launched with strictly military and foreign-intel missions in mind, using them as tools for law enforcement may not entirely cross the PCA, but it gets too close for comfort.

Unless the use of the satellites is strictly limited to national-security applications, such as a counterterrorist operation or immigration enforcement (both of which are legitimate national-security concerns under federal jurisdiction), satellites should not be used as law-enforcement tools. We did not put those military assets in orbit to be deployed against the people of the United States.

If real conservatism -- not the faux conservatism practiced by neocons and holy rollers -- makes a return, there might be hope for our political system. So far, Democrats seem to be rather unwilling to challenge the neo-fascistic growth of executive power and corporate collaboration defiantly embraced by the Bush Administration.

I ask conservatives: Do you relish the thought of a President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama or President John Edwards having the same kind of extra-Constitutional powers Bush is exercising?

Really, folks.

(Personally I am much less worried about the Democrats with that kind of power, but this is still power that is unprecedented and not sanctioned by the Constitution that has helped America flourish for over 200 years. Where's the "strict constructionism" when it comes to presidential authority?)

More on this theme soon.

They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children. 

--Ann Richards

If you're looking for reasoned analysis, read no further.

I'm too fucking tired. I think I'm just going to take to my fainting couch and have a case of the vapors. I'm going to gather my lovely children around me, and instruct them in the gentle, moral arts, so that both my daughters grow up to be fine mothers, who recognize that despite their intellects, their ambitions, and their dreams, when push comes to shove, (and a lady never shoves,) their jobs are about putting their children above all.

The fate of Western, elite, white society depends upon it.

All else is pure selfishness.

You can call me paranoid, but I don't think that it's accidental that at the same time that we have a virtual war going on against women in the United States (and that war is spreading throughout the West) --just one example among many--over the right to privacy, at the same time, another assault has been re-launched. It's all part and parcel of the same meme: women are selfish creatures. We cannot be trusted.

I finally got to see Kinsey tonight. In it, he wonders what this country would be like if the Puritans had stayed in England. Someone recently told me that the first white people were “the only ones here” so this has to be a Christian country. In fact, there were millions of people already here. There were thriving cultures older than anything that existed in Europe, with democratic governments, no prisons, no debt, no sexual guilt, no sexual repression and almost no spousal or child abuse. Then the Puritans arrived.

The Puritans brought disease, repression, slavery, hatred and violence. They persecuted “Witches” and were the first wave of what turned out to be systematic genocide and theft. America’s first fascists. Church attendance mandatory, and heaven help you if you ran afoul of the local clergy. The Patriots resisted, ushering in an age of enlightenment and drawing upon Native American democracies they created a free nation. Freedom took a little longer than they’d hoped, but the cycle had begun. American culture formed a spiral, moving forward, curving back around to an earlier, more repressive attitude, which creates the resistance needed to swing around and move the culture forward. Kinsey was the antidote to the last wave of fascism, when J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy were imposing their respective repression and suspicion on the creative (and therefore subversive) elements of the country.

Kinsey showed people that most of them weren’t as weird as they thought. He pulled back the curtain and saw the sex that went on everywhere but was never mentioned. His research was the beginning of homosexuality being viewed as a natural variation instead of an illness. It was the death of Freud’s mythical “vaginal orgasm” that had been used against women for a century. He looked at the reality of the human animal and stripped away the false structure of 5,000 year-old tribal mores that have nothing to do with our lives today.

The spiral continues. We had a push forward in the 60’s and 70’s, had our predictable conservative backlash in the 80’s and we’re smack in the middle of a current manifestation of the same old fascist forces that live in constant fear that somebody is having a good time. Always under the mantle of “morality,” these forces have a financial interest in keeping people repressed. It takes real repression to fuel persecution, and it takes persecution to control a population and to wage a war. War is a money-making machine for the wealthy. Guilt keeps church coffers full. Great power measures itself against those it holds powerless. Happy people won’t kill for your cause. Liberated women dare expect orgasms, equal pay, and won’t tolerate abuse or neglect. If a rich white man is to maintain his fortune, he believes he has to exploit the weakness of minorities, women and the poor so he can build his empire on their backs. It’s time for empires of wealth and oppression to fall. The myth of scarcity and the expedience of greed and corruption are un-American, racist, sexist, hateful hurtful lies that have lived too long.

America is at a crucial juncture. The confirmation of Sam Alito will give dangerous leverage to the Republican War on Sex. The demagogues of the Radical Right say our culture is sex obsessed when it is actually sexually repressed. They’re doing everything they can to destroy the social and sexual progress we’ve made in the last 40 years. We’re looking at a return of sodomy laws, the loss of access to birth control as well as abortion, prison sentences for normal adult sexuality, complete loss of privacy, and strip searches without warrants if they succeed. Women will be out of the work force and under the thumbs of their husbands.

Kinsey was the first to tell us that Sex is Good. It’s a normal adult activity in all its glorious variety. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going back into the closet or under the sheets. In a free country, no one should be afraid to be a healthy, sexual adult. Do you want the government in bed with you? Deciding when you can have sex, how you can do it, and with whom. Do you want the state deciding you must have a child that is unplanned and unwanted – after they’ve taken away the contraceptives you relied on to prevent that unwanted pregnancy?

Do you want George Bush making your most intimate decisions for you?
When you can have sex?
How you can live?
When you can die?

Kinsey isn’t here. It’s up to us to make sure we stay as free as we are, and that the social progress that’s dawning for the LGBT community isn’t stopped before it has really begun. Stopping Alito’s nomination is just step one, but it’s crucial. Europe laughs at us for our prudishness – don’t let them pity us our oppression.

Strip Search Sammy cannot sit on the Supreme Court!
Demand an appropriate, moderate Justice instead of a Right Wing extremist.

No Alito, No Way!

A group blog dedicated to exploring the politics of abortion

Quick quiz:

1) When Richard Nixon devised the "Southern Strategy", what did he mean to do with it?

A) To woo black Southerners by making it clear that their lives were less important than having "adventures" in Middle Eastern countries under false pretenses
B) To reshape the party as the party of working class people by promoting a platform of economic rights and policies such as universal health care that might make a huge difference in the lives of poor and working class people who barely scrape by
C) To use race-baiting rhetoric about crime and welfare to pull all the racist Southern Democrats in who were angry that their liberal party had lived up to the idea of equality and embraced civil rights

If you answered A) or B), you're just as delusional as Ilyka Damen.

2) What party has used the "Southern Strategy" to rile up voters about crime and welfare even as the former has been cascading downwards and the latter has been the dictionary definition of a non-issue as far as government spending, especially compared to the amount of money spent to kill innocent Muslims?

A) The Green Party
B) The Democrats
C) The Republicans

If you answered A) or B), you're just as delusional as Ilyka Damen.

3) What politician hired a man as a political advisor who scored up votes in the primaries by calling up potential voters and informing them that his candidate's competition had darker-skinned children and implied that he was what many white people in the South still quaintly call a "n----r l---r"?

A) John Kerry
B) John McCain
C) George Bush

If you answered A) or B), you're just as delusional as Ilyka Damen.

4) What person then went on as President to blow off the easily predictable death of thousands of people of the very race his party built a reputation on trashing?

1) Abraham Lincoln
2) John F. Kennedy
3) George W. Bush

If you answered A) or B), you're just as delusional as Ilyka Damen.

5) What President then had his mother chuckle over how lucky certain people were that we deemed to save some of their lives after they had to live in shit for days waiting for help that we actually allowed the savages "underprivileged" to have a dry place to sleep in a room that houses thousands now?

A) Marie Antionette
B) Homer Simpson
C) George W. Bush

If you answered A) or B), you're just as delusional as Ilyka Damen.

Are all Republicans racist? No, not all. Are their leaders racist? Well, if you thinking hating all poor people and thinking that the suffering of poor people of a certain race will help your polls more than the suffering of the poor of another race, then I guess not. And because some people skip meat for breakfast once in awhile, that makes them vegetarians.

But yeah, that there are some writers that some Republicans somewhere don't read that are racist means that systematic, ruthless, obvious, ugly racism from the top-down can safely be ignored and the folks at Townhall can blame "gangsters" and black "immorality" for the tragedy in New Orleans without being called racist. Keep at it and you can drag minstrel shows out in public again and whine that liberals are being alarmist by calling you racist.

Now it's time for that most odious of tasks--wading into Townhall and finding out what the spin to protect His Majesty is going to be in light of this horrific tragedy.

Shorter Thomas Sowell: Take pity on Our Lord the Shrub, because unlike the people of New Orleans, he is a human being with failings.

Shorter Rebecca Hagelin: The people in the days of the Titanic had the right idea--drown all of your poor people so there's no one left to get angry.

Shorter Suzanne Fields: Katrina proves Cindy Sheehan wrong, because, um...Iraqis and she hates freedom!

Shorter Jack Kemp: Let's look at Katrina as a great opportunity to flush the poor and the black out and rebuild the city for bidnessmen and erect McMansions as far as the eye can see. It's like dropping a bomb on the city and taking it over but we didn't even have to buy the bombs!