May Contain Nuts

… is in the tank for Obama.

I think the most amusing part of that article are the comments accusing FOX’s own poll of having a liberal bias. And of course, the saddest part are the comments trumpeting the Bradley Effect as McCain’s saving grace / ace in the hole. Evidently in order for McCain to win, he has to do so with the help of racist bastards. Nice.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over, but at this point, I think the Fat Lady is getting ready for her overture. Hopefully this’ll be called early tomorrow night so I don’t have to stay up all night waiting for the results to come in from Colorado (though I may stay up just to see which color Arizona turns). At least I’m on the west coast this election cycle… I watched the last two in Kentucky, and that sucked. Was up until 4 AM waiting to see who won… then went to bed with nightmares :P.

So apparently, James Dobson won’t be voting if Giuliani is the Republican Presidential candidate. While I can at least appreciate his beliefs and his reasons for having them which would ostensibly keep him from voting, this raises an interesting question about the role of religion in politics…

The former NYC mayor is apparently on record (according to CNN) as personally despising the practice of abortion (around which half of Dobson’s issue apparently revolves), but is committed to a woman’s right to have one. While his personal views on homosexuality aren’t spelled out in the CNN article, it seems to indicate that he is also an advocate of equal rights for said individuals. I think that there’s an important point to be made here, and it’s this:

In the realm of politics, your personal religious beliefs do not necessarily reflect the best direction for public policy. There are plenty more people in this country than Christians, and the law needs to encompass all of those people, providing a legal framework for support and behavioral regulations that favor no one group over another. This is obviously a hard thing to do, and when you get into the supposedly moral gray areas of things like homosexuality and abortion, it becomes even harder. Obviously, groups opposed to such practices (and I use that word knowing that it applies better to abortion than to homosexuality, but I’m going with it because I don’t feel like using a thesaurus) wish to see them outlawed in their country of origin (if not everywhere…). Yet other groups find nothing wrong with these practices, and believe that it is morally wrong to legislate against them on the basis of religious belief alone.

I don’t want to get too deep into the whys and wherefores of these issues, because they’re whole papers unto themselves (I know, I wrote one on the subject of gay marriage in school), and there are obviously exceptions to the notion I’m about to put forward, both in these issues and in others, but on the whole, I think it’s a good rule of thumb, and I’m likely to support any candidate on either “side” of the aisle that adopts it as general course. The government should not be required to legislate morality to its citizens (nor do I think it’s appropriate for it to do so). That’s the role of religion, and if religion is doing the job it’s supposed to, then citizens will make “right” choices based upon it. The government’s job is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens, as ordained in the Constitution (oh noes, I’ve invoked the C word!):

[...] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity [...]

To that end, it must encompass all of its citizens in the approach it takes to legislation, regardless of the personal beliefs of a segment of those citizens or the lawmakers themselves.

Now, if Giuliani is just intentionally waffling in an effort to garner support on both sides of an issue, first off, he’s not as smart as I would have liked to give him credit for… in this era of 24-hour news, anything you say gets re-processed about a billion times and played right next to other comments you’ve made… and if the press doesn’t like you very much, those comparisons may not be very favorable. Any discrepancies in your comments will get torn to shreds, so if he’s waffling and not expecting that to happen, he’s lost some serious points in my book. On the other hand, if he’s really serious about his personal beliefs versus his public stance on these issues, I’m willing to grant him more than a few bonus points for being honest about it, plus a few more for putting the country ahead of himself. Realistically, I think he falls somewhere in the middle of these two possibilities; I don’t think even the most starry-eyed politician is idealistic enough to think that the sort of idealistic notion of the role of government I proposed is going to get them elected. Everyone panders and doublespeaks… it’s just a measure of degree these days.

Lawmaker wants to prohibit Muslim from using Quran during swearing-in at Congress

It smells like hypocrisy… or bullshit…

[Mary] Cheney’s pregnancy has drawn fire from some conservatives, including James Dobson, chairman of the Focus on the Family lobbying group, who has clashed with the Bush administration in the past.

“We should not enter into yet another untested and far-reaching social experiment, this one driven by the desires of same-sex couples to bear and raise children,” Dobson said in a recent commentary published on the organization’s Web site.

However, he said his position was not meant to “harm or insult women such as Cheney and Poe.”

At the risk of sounding like an angry liberal whiner, I’d like to draw people’s attention to something I read in this CNN article on the possible advancement and passage of some liberal rights laws in the new Congress next year.

Another conservative leader, the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, asserted that the gay-rights bills likely to advance next year will infringe on the rights of those who condemn homosexuality.

“All Americans must be prepared to endure serious threats to their freedom of speech, their right to make employment decisions as business owners and their religious freedom in the business world,” Sheldon said.

I simply can’t help but think that this is the same sort of rhetoric that was thrown about in the past during the movement for equal rights for Blacks (sorry, African-Americans… have to keep up the liberal Pee Cee-ness ;P) in the 50’s.

I was going to say something else, but the more I stare at this guy’s comment, the more I think it speaks for itself. So, I’ll just end on this: What the HELL is wrong with people?

CNN.com - House approves wiretap law before hitting campaign trail - Sep 28, 2006

I honestly fail to understand how not wanting a warrantless wiretapping program and demanding that prisoners be treated like people is equivalent to “coddling terrorists”…

Seriously, I’m getting really, really sick of this “with us or against us” crap. It’s the same damn tune the Republican party has been singing for the past five years… first with the Taliban in Afghanistan, then with Saddam Husein in Iraq, and now with the much more amorphous and generalized term of “terrorists”, who could be (and, presumably in some people’s minds, are) anywhere and everywhere. Nothing is black and white, and questioning motives or practices is not logically equivalent to siding with the enemy. Of course, since nobody in Washington (along with most of this country) seems to have been capable of actually passing a logic class, this kind of rhetoric usually works wonders in an election pinch when you’re down by a few dozen points in the polls… both sides are guilty of this, but I’ve been listening to Republicans do it more consistently and with greater fervor lately, and it’s kind of starting to piss me off.

There are days when the fact that half the people in my college logic class didn’t grasp that the statement “Bill Gates is rich, Bill Gates is a software programmer. Because Bill Gates is a software programmer, all software programmers are rich” is a logical fallacy makes me fear for the future of debate.

Can we elect Jon Stewart as president? Seriously…

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, when exactly did election season become a mud-slinging exercise? Really, that’s all any of these ads ever do anymore… nobody ever goes on TV and says “this is what I stand for, this is what I will do”. It’s all about “this is what Jackass McStupidface has done in the past. Why on God’s earth would you want to vote for that asshole?”

Maybe I should make an ad that actually says that, and get someone to run it… even if it’s just on a cable channel late at night so I can actually use the words “jackass” and “asshole”. I just wonder if anyone would get it…

Congress gives itself a pay raise while Republicans kill a minimum wage increase.

That seems fair. (not…)

From CNET News.com:

During a speech in November, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales endorsed the idea [of expanding the DMCA] and said at the time that he would send Congress draft legislation. Such changes are necessary because new technology is “encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft,” Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, “quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities.”

Didn’t you know that?

I’m glad someone in Washington is finally starting to understand the sheer breadth of authority that the Patriot Act grants to the government to violate our freedoms as guaranteed under the first ten amendments to the Constitution. According to a CNN report on a NY Times story that ran today, the NSA has been eavesdropping on hundreds, and potentially thousands of people in the US without a warrant, and the only probable cause being that they might be terrorists. More details are here and here. I do, however, want to point out a few quotes from the articles.

From the first:

Administration officials reacted to the report by asserting that the president has respected the Constitution while striving to protect the American people. Rice said Bush has “acted lawfully in every step that he has taken.” And McClellan said Bush “is going to remain fully committed to upholding our Constitution and protect the civil liberties of the American people. And he has done both.”

I’m sure that Bush has acted lawfully, because the Patriot Act’s provisions let you target just about anyone for no better reason than they might do something at some time somewhere. That’s why they’re so damn scary (and to think, this is the less scary version that doesn’t let your meter reader spy on you and turn you in).
From the second, with another quote from McClellan related to the one above:

“The president is firmly committed to upholding our Constitution and upholding people’s civil liberties. That is something he has always kept in mind as we have moved forward from the attacks of September 11, to do everything within our power to prevent attacks from happening,” McClellan said.

Is it just me, or did he just define “civil liberties” as “being safe from an attack”?

I fully understand the difficulty of trying to prevent terrorists from attacking the US or any other country, but there are limits to how far the government should be allowed to go to get that information. Monitoring phone calls and emails without warrant or even probable cause (which you need to get a warrant, hence the allowance of warrant-less monitoring) is too far beyond the rule of law as allowed by the Constitution. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for preventing terrorist attacks, because that’s something nobody should have to worry about. But to guarantee our safety by abandoning the principles that make this country what it is is unacceptable. And the kicker is, there’s been little to no evidence, IMHO, that the Patriot Act has done much of anything.

So now the Patriot Act is stalling in the Senate, with the expiration/renewal date drawing ever-closer. This should be interesting.