I like to think I defy categorization. According to the Political Compass Questionaire (about 6 pages of questions without any “no opinion” choices), I am “Libertarian Left.” Better yet, my dot is right in there with Gandhi, Mandela and the Dalai Lama — what company! mjh
Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -5.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87
The Writer’s Almanac – MARCH 21 – 27, 2005
“The Blue Blanket” by Sue Ellen Thompson
Toward the end, my father argued
with my mother over everything: He wanted
her to eat again. He wanted her to take
her medicine. He wanted her
to live. He argued with her in their bed
at naptime. He was cold, he said,
tugging at the blanket tangled
in my mother’s wasted limbs. From the hall
outside their room I listened
as love, caught and fettered, howled
at its captors, gnawing at its own flesh
in its frenzy to escape. Then I entered
without knocking, freed the blanket
trapped between my mother’s knees and shook
it out once, high above
their bodies’ cursive. It floated
for a moment, blue as the Italian sky
into which my father flew his bombs
in 1943, blue as the hat I’d bought her
for the winter she would never live
to see. My father’s agitation eased,
my mother smiled up at me, her face
lucent with gratitude, as the blanket
sifted down on them like earth.
“This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy,” Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill, said. “There are going to be repercussions from this vote. There are a number of people who feel that the government is getting involved in their personal lives in a way that scares them.”
“This is a clash between the social conservatives and the process conservatives, and I would count myself a process conservative,” said David Davenport of the Hoover Institute, a conservative research organization. “When a case like this has been heard by 19 judges in six courts and it’s been appealed to the Supreme Court three times, the process has worked – even if it hasn’t given the result that the social conservatives want. For Congress to step in really is a violation of federalism.” …
Representative Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who is the House majority leader, bristled on Sunday when he was asked about how to square the bill with federalist precepts.
“I really think it is interesting that the media is defining what conservatism is,” Mr. DeLay said. “The conservative doctrine here is the Constitution of the United States.”
The Republican Party has long associated itself with limiting the power of the federal government over the states, though this is not the only time that party leaders have veered from that position. Most famously, in 2000, it persuaded the Supreme Court to overturn a Florida court ruling ordering a recount of the vote in the presidential election between Al Gore and George Bush.
But now the Schiavo case is illustrating splinters in the conservative movement that Mr. Bush managed to bridge in his last campaign, and the challenges Mr. Bush and Republicans face in trying to govern over the next two years, even though they control Congress as well as the White House.
Darwinism and Its Discontents (washingtonpost.com)
[I]n an 1860 debate at Oxford University, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce — a leading critic of Darwinism — mockingly asked scholar T.H. Huxley whether he was descended from apes on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Huxley’s response is worth noting, even 145 years later:
“A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.
“If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.”
[via MARK ECKENWILER, via dangerousmeta!]
Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, a new cadre of daring and original thinkers arose. These bold innovators had a key insight: that you no longer had to choose between being an activist and a lobbyist. You could be both. You could harness the power of K Street to promote the goals of Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich. And best of all, you could get rich while doing it! …
Soon the creative revolutionaries were blending the high-toned forms of the think tank with the low-toned scams of the buckraker. …
As time went by, the spectacular devolution of morals accelerated. Many of the young innovators were behaving like people who, having read Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative,” embraced the conservative part while discarding the conscience part. …
The sleazo-cons thought they could take over K Street to advance their agenda. As it transpired, K Street took over them.
Note this is from Brooks, the Liberal’s favorite Conservative. If you’re unfamiliar with Abramoff the Scoundrel, read this and then start researching. Now with Bill Moyers covered this in depth 6 months ago. mjh
ABC News: GOP Talking Points on Terri Schiavo
March 21, 2005 — The following memo listing talking points on the Terri Schiavo case was circulated among Republican senators on the floor of the Senate.
This is an exact, full copy of the document obtained exclusively by ABC News and first reported Friday, March 18, 2005, by Linda Douglass on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” … [mjh: follow the link above for full text; I’m excerpting 3 points.]
• This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.
• This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats. …
• This legislation ensures that individuals like Terri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy.
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The Washington Monthly by Kevin Drum
TERRI SCHIAVO AND THE LIMITS OF CYNICISM….Via Think Progress, here’s a fascinating ABC News poll about the Terri Schiavo affair. It turns out that not only do large majorities favor removing her feeding tube and oppose federal intervention in her case, but huge majorities know perfectly well that Tom DeLay and his crew are in it solely for political advantage. When you drill down into the numbers, it becomes obvious that even people who support DeLay’s position don’t believe he has any actual concern for Terri Schiavo.
Now, I realize that in one sense this doesn’t matter. This whole thing isn’t about majority support, it’s about pandering to one specific segment of the GOP base. But here’s the thing: even evangelical Christians don’t support congressional intervention. Apparently the DeLay/Frist/Bush axis has dealt with this so cynically that even the people they’re pandering to are uneasy about being treated with such open condescension.
This is not an issue that will last in the public mind for more than a few days, but it’s still nice to see that even Bush’s own supporters see through him from time to time. Even the pandering cynicism of the modern Republican party apparently has its limits.
—–
The Daily Aneurysm at jabartlett.com
So it should surprise nobody that losing in federal court this morning doesn’t mark the end of anything. Nobody’s saying, “Well, we had our hearing, and that’s all we could hope for.” Nope. Rick Santorum has already thrown a hissy fit: “You have judicial tyranny here,” Santorum told WABC Radio in New York. “Congress passed a law that said that you had to look at this case. He simply thumbed his nose at Congress.”
To anyone not drunk on self-righteousness, however, it seems clear that judge James Whittemore did indeed look at the case, and his ruling is reasonable by the standards of the reality-based community, at least. He ruled that the 19 previous court hearings in the case have adequately protected Schiavo’s rights, and that despite the life-and-death stakes at this moment, he had no choice but to apply the law, and by that standard, he wouldn’t rule to reinsert the feeding tube.