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Comment spam attacks have twice shut down my website, and as such, I've disabled commenting for now, pending figuring out how to keep comment spam robots from overwhelming this site.
Also, I'll be in Mexico from July 29 to Aug. 7, so if you send me email, I probably won't read it until next week, and if you call me, I probably won't return your phone call, as it's expensive to answer calls in foreign countries (thanks, Verizon).
From the very beginning of the illegal wiretapping case being brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against the government and AT&T, both of the defendants have tried to get the case dismissed. The government wants the case dismissed because of state secrets and national security; AT&T wants the case dismissed because of trade secrets. Yesterday, in a 72-page decision, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California denied both the government's and AT&T's motions to dismiss.
What struck me as odd, though, is one of the justifications the government uses to bolster its claim that the wiretapping isn't illegal:
Additionally, the government contends that plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment claim fails because no warrant is required for the alleged searches. In particular, the government contends that the executive has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the warrant requirement does not apply here because this case involves “special needs” that go beyond a routine interest in law enforcement. [Citations removed, emphasis added.]
This is the government's official stance? That the executive has the constitutional equivalent of magic powers thar allow him to conduct searches without a warrant, in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment?! Some DOJ lawyer wrote this down, and his boss approved that? I thought the whole "the president has inherent constitutional authority that isn't explicitly mentioned, or even implicitly mentioned, but is there nonetheless, just trust us" was a public relations creation. But now it's being used as a legal justification? These people must have gone to law school at Patriot University.
With the failure of the gay marriage amendment and the flag-burning amendment, Republicans in Congress are in a bind: how can they show their constituency in the Religious Right that they care deeply about institutionalizing Christianity and making patriotism mandatory? And during an election year, nonetheless! Not even the Severed Head of Mussolini could think of a way out of this -- and we know that he's been consulted, as he lives in a safe in Dick Cheney's office.
The answer has come in the form of H.R. 2389, a bill that would prohibit federal courts from ruling on the issue of whether or not "under God" belongs in the Pledge of Allegiance. Congress' authority to limit what cases federal courts can hear comes from its power to establish courts as provided in Art. III § 1 of the Constitution. Art. III § 2 allows Congress to specify the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction.
Ah, yes! That's the posturing I was looking for! With any luck, the bill will be passed and the Religious Right will finally be appeased! And there's no way the courts can do anything about it! Except the D.C. Circuit Court, which was specifically exempted from this prohibition.
Oh, and guess what? This isn't just a proposed bill. This bill passed the House yesterday, 260-167, along mostly party lines. Now it's on to the Senate!
Here we are in Year Six of the Bush Administration, and President Bush is about to use his first veto ... ever.
Were you aware? In his first term, Bush didn't veto a single bill. Now, halfway through his second term, he finally vetoes a bill. And what is it about? It's a bill authorizing federal funding for stem cell research. Recall that, back in 2001, before he became the Terror President, Bush had nothing better to worry about than stacked energy policies and stem cells. The Religious Right -- which is at the core of Bush's base -- detests using embryonic stem cells for research, and in 2001, Bush issued an Executive Order placing a moratorium on federal funding for new embryonic stem cells lines. There were already sixty embryonic stem cell lines in existence, he said, and the government will continue to fund those. (Of course, it is now well-documented that Bush lied when he said there were sixty stem cell lines. Currently, there are about twenty viable lines, with "viable" being the key word.)
The bill, passed in 2005 by the House and Tuesday by the Senate, allowed couples who had embryos frozen in fertility clinics to donate them to research. Bush vetoed the bill this morning, saying that the bill "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. "
"Oh, really?" counters Salon contributor Scott Rosenberg:
Here is why Bush's position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded.If Bush and his administration truly believe that destroying an embryo is a kind of murder, they shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about research funding: They should immediately shut down every fertility clinic in the country, arrest the doctors and staff who operate them, and charge all the wannabe parents who have been wantonly slaughtering legions of the unborn.
But of course they'll never do such a thing. (Nor, to be absolutely clear, do I think they should.) Bush could not care less about this issue except as far as it helps burnish his pro-life credentials among his "base." This has been true since the first airing of Bush's position in 2001, as I said back then. So he finds a purely symbolic way of taking a stand, but won't follow the logic of his position to the place where it might cause him any political harm -- as opposing the family-building dreams of millions of middle-class Americans would doubtless do.
If Bush stated his opposition to the destruction of embryos as including fertility clinics, there would be riots in the streets and he would never be spoken to again. So, instead of being put to some use, these embryos from fertility clinics will be destroyed anyway! "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research," he said of children born of "adopted" embryos from fertility clinics. But these are few and far-between; thousands of embryos will be destroyed -- not in the name of research -- but in the name of nothing! The argument is the same as that for abortion: "You could be aborting the next Einstein." The point is moot! There's an equal chance that I'm aborting the anti-Christ; it really doesn't matter. The same goes for posturing with these children: sure, it's great that they were born from adopted embryos. That's great. But if they hadn't been born from those embryos, because the embryos were destroyed, we wouldn't miss them at all! What Bush should have done is brought a vial of frozen embryos on stage to cuddle with. Of course, humans don't respond to frozen embryos the same way they do to babies, so some of the pathos gets lost.
Consumerist was anonymously sent a plain manilla envelope one day. Inside was an eighty-page booklet entitled AOL Member Retention Manual. The manual is the guide AOL sales reps use to try and lure you back in if you call up AOL and say that you want to cancel your service. There are a hundred thousand tactics located within the manual's pages, different ways of wearing a customer down to the point where it's easier just to agree to stay with AOL than try to cancel. (Via Boing Boing.)
Conservatives cannot govern
This according to an interesting paper by Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College. Wolfe doesn't say that conservatives can't govern because they're incompetent; he says that they can't govern because they don't believe in government. At its heart, conservatism, says Wolfe, is the belief in tiny, tiny government. The problem is that (1) the United States is not an inherently conservative country ("In Europe, a conservative was someone who defended the traditions of the monarchy, justified the privileges of the nobility, and welcomed the intervention of a state-affiliated clergy into politics") and (2) whatever "conservatism" used to be, the G.W. Bush fellows are not conservative.
The paper is liberally biased and does contain some unjustified generalizations and questionable opinions, but its thesis is good: "Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well." This part of the paper is very good: Wolfe suggests that the Bush administration, which abhors government, has gone out of its way to fill high positions with people who will gut their own departments.
Joe Albaugh was the head of FEMA before Michael Brown, and Allbaugh's credentials to run the organization were that he was one of Bush's Texas gubernatorial aides. (By contrast, Clinton's FEMA director, James Lee Witt, wrote the book -- literally, the only college textbook -- on emergency management.) The problem with Allbaugh was that he was the head of an organization that he believed should never have existed, and consequently, instead of trying to make it better, he tried to make it worse:
[Allbaugh and Brown] did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should not be in the business of disaster management. "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to state and local risk management," Allbaugh had testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee in May, 2001. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." There was the conservative dilemma in a nutshell: a man put in charge of a mission in which he did not believe.
Why, then, has government become so big? Wolfe's suggestion is that conservatives now understand that government is here to stay, and there's nothing they can do about it. Americans expect entitlement programs, federal assistance, and federal money. Wolfe says that conservatives have two reasons for wanting to be in government: "One is to prevent liberals from [using government to solve problems]; if government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. The other is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors: business will lavish cash on politicians (called campaign contributions) while politicians will throw the money back at business (called public policy)."
Wolfe's paper is filled with such incendiary statements (the thrust of which is "liberals good, conservatives bad") that are either poorly justified or not justified at all. But he's got a good idea. Too bad it wasn't executed better.
Seriously, Israel. You're psychotic.
So, Hezbollah soldiers in Lebanon kidnap two Israeli soldiers. I think we can all agree that that's bad and something should be done about it. But Israel, still in the mindset that the world is out to get it (which is largely true in the Middle East), does what it usually does in instances like this: it goes bat-shit insane, sending its (U.S.-provided) jets into enemy territory, blowing up cities, killing civilians, and giving Arabs all the more reason to hate it. This is what we in the business call a "cycle."
But, thankfully, up until now, they've only been blowing up Lebanese, and over here in the west, we can't even spell "Lebanese," so we don't care. But we do care about Canadians! Yes, seven Canadian citizens were killed by Israel randomly, madly flinging bombs into the air.
This is not to say that Israel shouldn't defend itself. Many groups -- and even some countries -- hate Israel (including our friend over in Iran) and would like to see it explode. But Israel's response to attacks upon it are waaay beyond retaliation, and this is not a new thing. A Palestinian blows up a restaurant; the Israeli Air Force levels his home village. Is this really conducive to anything but causing more violence? When Israel starts accidentally killing people who had nothing to do with a particular terrorist attack, it breeds more terrorists! Israel hasn't run afoul of foreign governments, I don't think, until now: a western government has had some of its citizens killed by Israel. If it had been the United States, everything would be okay. No matter what Israel does, the United States is behind them, one hundred percent. But the rest of the world isn't the same way and they won't watch Israel gulp down crazy pills as we will.
This is where the film Munich is valuable. Directed by Stephen Spielberg -- a Jew, by the way -- the film presents a nuanced opinion of Israel's penchant for bloodthirsty revenge. The character of Golda Meir even understands that going out and killing the people who planned the Munich massacre won't stop terrorism; all it will do is send the message that you shouldn't screw Israel. And that's a great message -- if this is junior high school. "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," she says, rationalizing the killing of people as necessary. In the end, Spielberg's film comes out on the side of not taking revenge. Not only does revenge not work as a security method -- unless your plan is to kill every last one of your enemies, as well as their descendants -- but it psychologically turns us into the people we hate. Now, if you can deal with that, then good for you: you now have the mental equipment to become a professional assassin.
Israel is on permanent defensive. Like a person who has had nothing but bad things happen to him his entire life, Israel reacts to every comment and every action as though it is a personal attack, and sends the most missiles it can at whoever made the comment or action. Israel still lives in fear of the Holocaust, and it is this fear that prompts it to act in this way. There will be no peace in the Middle East as long as (1) other countries continue to hate Israel, and (2) Israel continues these totally-out-of-proportion retaliatory tactics.
I was at the Emery Bay Public Market (which is like the mall food court if that food court were at the UN; seriously, instead of Arthur Treacher's and A&W, they have Vietnamese, Thai, French, Chinese, Persian -- there's a Food for All Seasons here) reading one of San Francisco's indy weeklies, appropriately titled SF Weekly. Flipping through the paper aimlessly while I ate my cheesesteak sandwich, I noticed in the "events" section that Lewis Black was coming to Cody's Books in The City to read excerpts from his memoir, Nothing's Sacred.
The date was July 15. That was today! And so, at 6 PM, Jared and I got on the BART and headed to Cody's Books.
Cody's is a San Francisco "chain" of bookstores (in quotation marks because there are only three of them, two of which are in Berkeley, and one of the Berkeley ones is closing soon) and it's pretty neat. When we arrived, twenty minutes before 7 PM, there were some chairs set up in the basement level in front of a podium.
Lewis Black then came out and said that he would not be reading from his book, because when he reads aloud, it reminds him of all the stuff he forgot to put into the book. Instead, he took our questions. Many people asked him many questions, like "What pisses you off most?" For someone as angry as Lewis Black, I'm sure it was hard to come to a conclusion about what pisses him off most, but he said that stupidity pissed him off most, especialyl stupidity in authority.
I asked him what his advice would be to a kid thinking of doing stand-up comedy. He replied, "I'd tell him that the gun store is down the street." But seriously, folks. He then said that his real advice was to just do it, and keep doing it, because the only way you're going to be good at it is to keep doing it until you're comfortable. And, he said, when he teaches stand-up, he advises people to focus on telling stories instead of telling jokes. Everyone, he said, has a funny story, and that's a good place to start.
He also talked to us about writing. Lewis Black, believe it or not, was a playwright for twenty years. He actually majored in drama at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and later went on to attend the Yale Drama School. If you're wondering what writing a book is like, he said, "take a pen and put your non-writing hand flat on the table, and then, with your other hand, take the pen, and stick it in your hand. Twist it around a little if you want. Then, take the pen out and don't do anything. Just leave the wound there. Clean it, of course, but just let it sit there." Black said that writing Nothing's Sacred was particularly difficult, because he wrote it while he was on tour. He doesn't recommend that anyone do writing and stand-up at the same time.
He says he's an optimist, though. "You can't be as angry as I am and not think that there's a better way," he said, meaning that people get angry because they know that there's a better way to do things.
After he talked, I got some books signed. It was a good experience, and Lewis Black is a genuinely nice guy. He really shines when he gets into his "mad as hell" persona; either he's really good at it, or he's done it for so long that it's second nature to him.
Oh, and what did he have to say about Stephen Colbert's appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner? "Jon and I talked about it, and we couldn't have done what Stephen did. Because Stephen's not a stand-up comic. No, it's true; any stand-up comic who did that would have been shitting his pants the whole time."
Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, is a vocal critic of global warming. But not in the way you might think.
People like Rush Limbaugh and the late Dixy Lee Ray -- from whom Limbaugh got most of his "facts" about global warming -- have been at the forefront of saying that there's no such thing as global warming and we shouldn't worry about it. On the other side is, most recently, former vice president Al Gore, whose film An Inconvenient Truth suggests that global warming is happening, humans are causing it, and it's a problem right now.
Lindzen offers a more nuanced position: one which doesn't lambast liberals for believing in global warming, but also one in which he doesn't outright deny the existence of global warming, either.
In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Lindzen criticizes Gore and other liberals for suggesting that there is a "consensus" on the issue of global warming. His op-ed goes on to provide evidence for reasons why global warming either isn't being caused by humans or isn't as dire a threat as we think:
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
I like Lindzen's characterization of Gore's position as one of "shrill alarmism." Rarely, if ever, do scientists make assertions that seem to be written in stone. Gore would have us believe that scientists do think this way, and they think this way about global warming. To the contrary, scientists always add a caveat or an asterisk to their conclusions, noting that their particular conclusions are based on their observations in a particular instance.
But unlike other critics of global warming (who deny both the observations and conclusions of global warming proponents), Lindzen accepts several findings of fact made by global warming proponents: that worldwide mean temperatures have increased by one degree Fahrenheit over the last century; that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen; that carbon dioxide should theoretically lead to increased temperatures. But, he says, these data do not necessarily mean that humans have caused these changes, nor that the changes are inherently bad:
Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
And what about that oft-cited Science survey, which found that 913 of 928 articles found using the key words "global climate change" came out in favor of human-caused global warming? Turns out that study was loaded to begin with.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
On both sides, we have policymakers and their co-horts misrepresenting facts about the issue. Why? Because the issue isn't as black-and-white as we may think. But policymakers cannot make policy based on nuance. In order to create laws that impact the nation and the planet, we need to have an overwhelming preponderance of evidence. In the case of global warming, that doesn't exist; so, people on both sides misrepresent facts and conclusions in an effort to make the case for their side so clear-cut that policymakers would have no choice but to support it.
But the facts don't support that. Sure, Earth's temperature has risen by one degree over the last hundred years -- but why? Some attribute it, by default, to human beings. Others suggest it is probably part of a natural process of warming and cooling. Temperatures worldwide "[rose] significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remain[ed] essentially flat since 1998," according to Lindzen. Scientists in the 1970s actually thought we were on the verge of another Ice Age because temperatures at that time were going down.
Why is it so hard for some to believe that this warming is part of a natural process? We know that Earth goes through such processes. During the Pax Romana, it was so warm in Europe that grapes could be grown for wine in England. We know this from historical documents and artifacts. By the 5th century AD, it became much colder in Europe, so much so that the Rhone River -- Rome's northern border -- froze over one winter, allowing barbarians to enter and begin the process of destroying the Roman Empire. Why is it so hard to believe that we're going through a warming cycle now?
This is a friendly memo to all the parents out there, concerned with their children's well being. Fuck you. Quit trying to sanitize the internet, cable and every other media that transports the real world into your living rooms. Seriously. Stop it. Here is why this is asinine, pointless and counter-productive.
Let's say your kid walks down the street one day and sees a fight. Bam. Violence. With no chance to discuss it, no chance to think about it, just the kind of senseless, pointless and brutal shit that happens in the world every day. Sanitizing the internet, making every movie meet standards of decency and eliminating porn will NOT protect your children. It will coddle them and turn them into heartless little idiots who lack the ability to function for themselves. I ask you this, which sacrifice is greater: not doing drugs because there are none available, or not doing drugs because you CHOOSE not to?
These decency advocates are attempting to make the first scenario not a reality, but the reality. No violent video games means no violent video gamers right? Instead of studying what it is that allows people such as myself to separate a Looney Tunes cartoon from a "How to Hit People With Anvils and Do No Harm" instructional video we just turn every cartoon out there into Davey and Goliath. Seriously, don't even think of producing your own content and publishing it on YouTube, they're after that now too. And this just furthers my point. The internet (and this extends to cable, CD's and DVD's) are not IN your house in the normal sense. They bring the outside world in, and here is the kicker, you have to invite them. Thusly, the internet is available to everyone. It is not only for pre-teens, nor should it be. It is there for the free exchange of ideas, across the globe. So quit trying to pawn it off on your kids as a babysitter and wonder "How on earth did they discover so much scatological porn?"
I know it is hard to be a parent. Believe me I do. I've had a ton of experience with kids, through friends and *shudders* a terrible roomie. But the thing is, the world is out there. It will find your kids when you're not looking. So stop bringing it into your house then censoring it. Look, you want to buy a painting of a nude and put up some fig leaves, knock your damn self out. But do not ask me to look at the same censorship in Cleveland because your kid in Kansas might be offended if he sees a pair of breasts bouncing around. Talk to your kid. I know it's hard, but do it. You know what, I can't tell you why it is I've never done drugs. I grew up with a lot of people who did. I've gone against a lot of what my parents told me to do. But I've been offered and turned down pot. I just didn't want to do it. And no amount of, "C'mon man this stuff is great" or other peer pressure BS could change my mind. Neither could internet cartoons, webcomics, movies, TV shows or CD's extolling the virtue of pot. So try, you know, parenting. Or have a single computer with internet access, in a central location in your house. If you catch your kid looking at something you don't want them to, explain to them why they shouldn't.
Tell your kids the difference between Looney Tunes and the real world, between Chamillionaire and the real world, hell, between the Real World and the real world. Trust me, it'll be well worth your time. I hope your kid doesn't have to see someone die while they're that young, but I know a lot of people who lost relatives, including siblings during childhood. That is the real trick with life, it comes to you. Sometimes you can't control how (sickness, death, divorce) and sometimes you can (the internet, cable, music). I will never, ever ask you to watch The Boondock Saints, listen to Nothingface or look at some of the trash that comes through the Foobies link on Fark.com. Really, I won't. So don't tell me that I can't look at it just because your kid might see it and be scarred. You don't want the real world in your house? Fine. Go Amish. But be warned, real life will find your kid. With or without your supervision.
Last week's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision signaled the end of the Court's 2005 term. Terms typically last from October to June. This term, the court saw two new justices -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito -- added to the court. Both justices are decidedly conservative, and with the absence of Sandra Day O'Connor, the court has shifted to the right.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy -- a conservative -- has become the new "swing" vote, writing concurring opinions in 5-4 decisions in which the "liberal" point of view prevailed.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, wrote an op-ed for USA Today in which he summarized the effects of Roberts and Alito on the last term and observed that they "proved every bit as ideological in major cases as predicted."
More importantly, Turley noted that this term's decisions marked a significant -- and frightening -- shift in the court's thinking:
These votes reveal a new vision of our society emerging from the new conservative base of the court with Roberts and Alito. It is a society with few checks on the government except when it comes to environmental protection, private property, affirmative action, or religious practices. It is the very transformation that many wanted to discuss in the confirmation hearings but were blocked by the refusal of the nominees to answer questions and the refusal of senators to insist on such answers.
If Turley is correct, then the court's right-hand side has become the evil conservative enemy we've always feared: a monster that wants to invade our privacy, allow the state unrestricted access to our homes, declare what our religion should be, and at the same time insist that it is for "smaller government" -- at least, as far as checking large corporations. Government should be free to pry into our bedrooms and our minds; government should be free to tell us what we can and cannot choose to do in our personal lives, even if those decisions affect no one but ourselves; government should be allowed to imprison us indefinitely without stating that we've done anything wrong, as long as it justifies that detention with the T-word. Government should execute evil-doers, even if there's a possibility that the evil-doers are actually innocent -- but only because it would be wasteful to spend more money trying to figure out if someone it was going to execute was actually guilty.
Thankfully, many cases were decided correctly. Hamdan, for example, successfully -- but narrowly -- put a stop on the Bush administration's assertions of total, unquestionable power. Georgia v. Randolph upheld the Fourth Amendment even as Hudson v. Michigan took it away. Gonzales v. Oregon finally put an end to John Ashcroft's ridiculous litigation against Oregon's assisted-suicide law, deciding after five years that the Oregon statute was constitutional.
Things are not as bad as Turley paints them: right now, it's Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts staunchly on the right, and that's a minority. But it's only a minority by one vote, and it's less of a minority than existed before, when Sandra Day O'Connor wasn't sure to vote with the conservatives. We should not be terrified immediately, but we should be worried.
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK, has proven himself to be a giant idiot time and again. Never mind his championship of last year's biggest pork-barrel project, the Bridge to Nowhere. Never mind that, as chairman of the committee investigating high gas prices last September, he refused -- even at the insistence of Democratic colleagues on the committee -- to place the presidents of the nation's largest oil companies under oath.
Last Thursday, Sen. Stevens has voiced his opposition to net neutrality in the Senate because of his own hilarious misunderstanding of how the Internet works. According to Sen. Stevens, there are two "internets": the commercial Internet and the personal Internet. Sometimes, the commercial Internet gets too clogged with things from the personal Internet, slowing down the commercial Internet, and this is why we need two Internets.
Now, I understand that Sen. Stevens thinks his "tubes" analogy is just a metaphor for how the Internet really works. But the Internet still doesn't behave in the way that he claims it does.
Please, people who live in Alaska, don't re-elect this guy. (Brian, tell your sister to dump his ass.)