Strict Constructionists Of Texas Wig Out

This blog may owe an apology for indicating that the law under which a professor was arrested in his own home was "The Stupidest Law In The Nation".

Well there is a new stupid kid on the block, the Texas Politicians, who have outlawed marriage accidentally.

At least according to the woman running for Texas Attorney General:

Texans: Are you really married?

Maybe not.

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

The amendment, approved by the Texas Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by Texas voters, declares that "marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." But the trouble-making phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

(Star Telegram, emphasis added [see also McClatchey, Freedom To Marry]). Everyone has heard about the world renowned strict constructionists of Texas who vehemently complain about judges who do not read the law as it is written, eschewing any excuses for deviating from exactly what it says.

Can you imagine the pretzel contortions they will be doing when they try to explain why strict constructionist ideology does not apply to their lack of command of American English?

A famous lawman from Texas, not Judge Roy L. Bean, infamously said "Childrens do learn", but that does not cover strict constructionists west of the Pecos evidently.

Holy Wars Have Holes In Them

When the U.S. High Priest In Chief living in the Great White Mosque of Oilah Akbar wrote a letter to The President of France, explaining his reason for invading Iraq, the U.S. High Priest In Chief quoted his Bible.

There are a plethora of verses that he might have used to convey a notion from one Head of State to another Head of State, however he chose a particularly difficult to understand passage, which read:

7. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,

8. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

9. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.

(Dogma of High Priest In Chief). When the holy warriors invaded a weak nation that had lots of oil, after invading a nation that now supplies the heroin to the world, they offered bounty to anyone who would finger a terrorist.

Many criminals in those nations fingered totally honest and good men and women who were then turned over to sadistic devils for rape and torture:

Rasul v. Rumsfeld, as I’ve explained before, is one of the first lawsuits brought by victims of the Bush administration’s torture and abuse policies. The plaintiffs claim they were in Afghanistan to do humanitarian relief work when they were captured by the Northern Alliance and turned over (or sold for bounty) to U.S. authorities. They were eventually shipped to Guantanamo Bay, where they were imprisoned in cages and, they claim, tortured and humiliated, forced to shave their beards and watch their Korans desecrated. All of these claims are backed up by the legal memos that have since been produced from the Department of Justice that authorized such techniques as part of “enhanced” interrogations. The men were returned home to the UK without charge in 2004.

(Washington Independent). Meanwhile some of those "sadistic devils" have become appellate judges or have burrowed deep into the Department of Just Us.

So Easy Cavemen Could Do State Dinner

The backdrop of the controversy about whether cave men terrorists are a big threat to us may have been bolstered at the state dinner, the biggest White House dinner event so far this year.

A guy named Tareq Salahi was not invited to the White House dinner, yet he got through all that super-dooper Homeland Security wall of security (the one Senator Ted Kennedy had a hard time getting through sometimes), to rub elbows while the presidents of two countries were there:

The Secret Service is investigating how a couple aspiring to be reality-show celebrities managed to appear at President Obama’s first state dinner without being on the guest list, provoking questions about security at the White House.

...

The Secret Service said its inquiry was focusing on one checkpoint.

...

The inquiry was begun after a Virginia couple, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, slipped past multiple layers of high-level White House security Tuesday night and managed to rub shoulders, literally, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, among others, at Washington’s most exclusive social event this year.

(New York Times). This underlines the same type of thing which happened a while back:

It only took 27 seconds for him to smuggle live bomb components through security detail in a federal building. Later, he assembled a bomb in the restroom, and then walked around the facility undetected.

...

Investigators from the the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, were able to penetrate all 10 of the undisclosed federal buildings it tested across the United States.

(Get Back Jo Jo). These stories get attention for awhile, then fade as deficit budgets are forged during lobbyist feeding frenzies once again.

But the bottom line question may be: "are cavemen really that good, or is security purposefully lax at times?"

Book Politics Makes Strange Duplicities

Oil-Qaeda's Sarah Thuh I and Sarah Thuh II

There is a story out that Sarah Palin met a look-alike (not Tina Fey) during her book tour.

It was purported to have happened near a town in the Appalachians, where two fans were waiting in line to purchase a copy of her book.

Is there a possibility that the Sarah Palin twin and Sarah Palin also have similar looking twin fans?

She asked the two fans, pictured below, why they were only buying one copy of the book.

They told her they could not read but had heard a lot of good things about her.

The two fans of Palin are "clean coal" lobby activists who were also seeking to find out if Palin's "spill baby spill" environmental policy would be compatible with their "flatten baby flatten" mountain top coal mining policy.

Oil-Qaeda's Darrel Thuh I and Darrel Thuh II

It is not clear whether or not the story is just a rumor, but evidently the two fans of Palin are also birther / tea baggers who were asking Palin if she would read her book to them, since they are such avid supporters of her presidency.

They were startled when the "other Palin" came into the store, surmising that either there were now two Palins or their moonshine still had become contaminated.

So, being extremely superstitious, they both ran from the store yelling something mavericky, while heading straight to the local church.

At the church they swore off moonshine and were saved, then hit the rogue campaign trail looking for Joe / Joe the Plumber, who wants Sarah's look alike to run as Vice Sarah.

Happy Thanksgiving!

... and season's greetings.

How Much Will Democrats Pay For War?

Obama did not start it

I mean in the upcoming elections, since they have shown, up until this point, that they will pay any amount for war, but very little for domestic needs.

The people have polled against the wars for years now, to no avail. The people overwhelmingly voted the neoCon republican hawks out, to give the democrats a chance to do what the people want.

Nevertheless, the wars continue, now having lasted longer than WW I and WW II combined.

The spotlight is now turning to the democrats and independents to see what they will do.

Will the democrats and independents have the backbone or will to punish the president and the congress if they thumb their noses at them in an escalation of the Afghanistan war, let the time slip on Iraq and GITMO so the both continue, and continue other Bush II policies the people rejected in the election?

We will find out in less than one year. I already know what I will do. But since the government is powerless to do the proper thing since it became infected with the toxins of power, giving rise to the plunder barons, neither your vote nor mine means anything for real any more.

Play It Again Sam

When you see damaging cycles repeating themselves every so often in a society, you can say you "see a pattern" in that society.

In individuals we would call such patterns indications of habit, which in some cases is indication of addiction.

I see a pattern in the sections of our government, which effect certain sections of our election cycles, that seem to be patterns of habitual, addictive behaviour.

In the post Keeping Up With The Jones Addiction, we looked at how the addiction to oil permeates into the prescription drug industry, which is a portion of the health care industry.

It was shown that the oil addiction is an addiction, then, which effects everyone.

A pattern I see developing now is one that begins when we attain a stable and prosperous economy. The people seem to become complacent during that time because they are not worrying about losing homes, jobs, health care, college funds, retirement funds, or similar disasters. Things are ok.

Then republicans use false information about economic and other conditions to win an election. Then the republicans screw things up very badly, so they lose power by being voted out of office.

Democrats just voted in then try to fix the damage while the republicans try to keep them from fixing it, even declaring that they want the president to fail.

The damage being repaired is so bad that it can't be fixed completely or fast enough, so democrats are lucky just to prevent a great, nation killing disaster.

The republicans carp and whine about democrats not fixing the national disaster fast enough, even though it was republicans who brought it upon us.

If the democrats do not patch up sufficiently, if enough people are deceived by the republicans, then the republicans can win in the upcoming election cycle, giving them another opportunity to do even further and deeper damage to the nation.

In a recent post Government A La Carte, we discussed the problem of having choices in an election that do not provide a method of solving the problems the people want fixed.

Ending the expensive, stupid wars is not on the table, not on the news, and not on the a la carte election menu.

The fact that we could build 20 Afghanistan schools for the cost of one soldier there for one year, or what we could do with that money in terms of homes, jobs, or health care at home, is considered irrelevant.

The elected government officials see themselves as The Department of Just Us, leaving the suffering populace out of the equation.

It would seem that more choices, in the form of other political parties with ideas that make more sense, would be one way out of the current debilitating systemic addiction.

Invasion - Valid Income Generation?

It was decades ago when China invaded Tibet. China thereafter claimed Tibet as its own.

That invasion was condemned by democracies around the world as a rogue thing for China to do.

In exactly the same vein, the United States has been similarly condemned in many world nations for the invasion of Iraq and for occupation of Afghanistan.

It seems that since we have invasions and occupations in common with China, have lost our nation financial sovereignty to China, it was a natural evolution for President Obama to be the first U.S. President to publicly announce:

We did note that while we recognize that Tibet is part of the People's Republic of China, the United States supports the early resumption of dialogue between the Chinese government and representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve any concerns and differences that the two sides may have.

(Washington Times, emphasis added). The pirates must be celebrating.

Invasion now increases one's territorial size, captures water, captures oil, but it also brings legitimization to the greatest enemy any free people must face and defeat.

Now The Details Of Health Care Reform

The republican filibuster to stop the health care reform bill in the United States Senate went down in flames last night.

The official vote records show it was 60-39 with one republican Ohio Senator not voting.

Now we can publicly hear the details of the bill, because when they debate the text of the bill both sides will have to provide us with a reference to the bill, then we can look it up to see who is intellectually honest and who is not.

I am suspicious of the intellectual honesty of the republicans at this point, because it was the republicans that did not want us to hear the details in public debate, the republicans who always whine the mantra "let it go to a floor vote" while they have the all time record of not allowing floor votes.

Such republican hypocrisy is not one of the ingredients of intellectual honesty, it is however an indicator of being overcome with the toxins of power.