loco

Right and Wrong at Once

“It’s not cheap to defend the constitution,” Mike McEntee said without a trace of irony.

Remember McEntee? It’s been years since he violated city law by running a blatantly partisan campaign as “the only real conservative” Republican in the race. He also got in trouble for violating federal law, which limits federal employees from engaging in PARTISAN campaigns. Note he broke two laws at once, while trying to capitalize on the Radical Right’s advances.

McEntee seems to be a right-winger who flaunts local and federal law and continues to battle in court long after it is over while covering his self-serving with lofty invocations of The Constitution (give that man a flag to wrap himself in). I’m surprised Bush hasn’t nominated him as a judge and DeLay hasn’t hired him as an aide. mjh

Federal Times

Employees as candidates

The rules on seeking political office are more complex. Employees can run for office only if the election is nonpartisan. But there are exceptions. If an employee lives in Washington, or one of its surrounding suburbs, or in one of 12 other communities in Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Tennessee and Washington state where a large number of residents are federal employees, he can run for office in partisan campaigns, but only as an independent.

Even when an election is nonpartisan, the Hatch Act can trip up federal employees.

For instance, Mike McEntee, an air traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration ran for mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., in 2001. Candidates for local office in that city are listed on the ballot without party affiliation, so McEntee’s campaign was within the bounds of the Hatch Act. In fact, he had already served on the city council after being elected in a nonpartisan election.

But the race for mayor was competitive, and McEntee’s opponents began emphasizing their republican — not Republican Party — ideology. In response, McEntee identified himself as a republican in his campaign literature after local newspapers began referring to him as a conservative republican.

OSC charged McEntee with violating the Hatch Act. He ultimately served a four-month suspension and since has spent more than $100,000 on attorneys to appeal his suspension. His appeal is pending before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

McEntee said that when he referred to himself as a conservative republican, he did not mean he was running as a member of the Republican Party. “In a partisan race, the parties choose the candidate to represent them. The party was not involved in selecting me to run,”? McEntee said. “I used the term republican as a way of describing my ideology.”

Dump Duhbya

the shameful declaration of religious war by Bill Frist

Opinion > Editorial: Bill Frist’s Religious War” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/16/opinion/16sat1.html?ex=1271304000&en=b200527534c58bb5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss”>The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Bill Frist’s Religious War

Right-wing Christian groups and the Republican politicians they bankroll have done much since the last election to impose their particular religious views on all Americans. But nothing comes close to the shameful declaration of religious war by Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, over the selection of judges for federal courts.

Senator Frist is to appear on a telecast sponsored by the Family Research Council, which styles itself a religious organization but is really just another Washington lobbying concern. The message is that the Democrats who oppose a tiny handful of President Bush’s judicial nominations are conducting an assault “against people of faith.” By that, Senator Frist and his allies do not mean people of all faiths, only those of their faith.

It is one thing when private groups foment this kind of intolerance. It is another thing entirely when it’s done by the highest-ranking member of the United States Senate, who swore on the Bible to uphold a Constitution that forbids the imposition of religious views on Americans. Unfortunately, Senator Frist and his allies are willing to break down the rules to push through their agenda – in this case, by creating what the senator knows is a false connection between religion and the debate about judges.

Senator Frist and his backers want to take away the sole tool Democrats have for resisting the appointment of unqualified judges: the filibuster. This is not about a majority or even a significant number of Bush nominees; it’s about a handful with fringe views or shaky qualifications. But Senator Frist is determined to get judges on the federal bench who are loyal to the Republican fringe and, he hopes, would accept a theocratic test on decisions.

Senator Frist has an even bigger game in mind than the current nominees: the next appointments to the Supreme Court, which the Republican conservatives view as their best chance to outlaw abortion and impose their moral code on the country.

We fully understand that a powerful branch of the Republican Party believes that the last election was won on “moral values.” Even if that were true, that’s a far cry from voting for one religion to dominate the entire country. President Bush owes it to Americans to stand up and say so.

Theirs

There must be freedom and there must be peace.

Radical Feminist Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies (washingtonpost.com) By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer

Ms. Dworkin spent her career exploring what she considered the subordination of women, which she saw everywhere from marriage to pornography to conservative politics.

Using terms such as “gynocide” to describe a cultural holocaust against women, she was adored by some who found in her writings and lectures a refreshing rebelliousness, and decried by others….

“I was good at holding the politicians’ feet to the fire, in private and in public, to excoriate them, to move their constituents, but from a basis of principle. That I can do. I have good practical instincts on where dominant structures are vulnerable. This requires a high tolerance for risk and conflict.”
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[m-pyre writes: Personally, Andrea Dworkin was not my icon.]
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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | With pot and porn outstripping corn, America’s black economy is flying high

The annual number of hardcore video rentals in the US has risen from 79m in 1985 to 759m in 2001. Hardcore pornography in the shape of videos, the internet, live sex acts and cable television is now estimated to generate around $10bn, roughly the same amount as Hollywood’s US box office receipts.

Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined. The industry has mushroomed since the 70s, when a federal study found that it was worth little more than $10m.

Now the US leads the world in pornography; about 211 new films are produced every week. Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and many of those in the trade are otherwise respectable citizens.

Nina Hartley, a porn star, told Schlosser: “You’d be surprised how many producers and manufacturers are Republicans.”

The majority of women in the films earn about $400 a scene. At the moment, there is a surplus of women in California hoping to enter the industry.

The internet has provided a fresh and profitable outlet. In 1997 about 22,000 porn websites existed; the number is now closer to 300,000 and growing.
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Reading Group Guide | THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny thinks, “you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore–or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.” …

“Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.” … “Between men and women, only death is shared equally.”
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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace.”

Theirs

More Paris Hiltons

The Founders broke with England, a class-based society. They recognized the limitless accumulation of wealth over generations inevitably leads to an aristocracy.

The Republican party today has made itself the party of that aristocracy. On behalf of the super rich, ‘folksy’ pseudo-conservatives have cleverly couched things in terms of “death taxes,” “losing the family farm” and “basic fairness.” The Super Rich will keep every penny; they can buy what they need and have no need for a government.

ABQjournal: House Votes To Perpetuate Loophole for Wealthy By Sergio Pareja, Assistant Professor, UNM School of Law

With huge deficits as far as the eye can see, calls for urgent program cuts, claims that Social Security is in crisis, and war in the Middle East, House lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday that would make a huge tax giveaway permanent. The giveaway, part of a bill to make estate tax repeal permanent, is a $5.6 million income tax loophole for the nation’s richest families that is unknown to most Americans. …

Most proponents of this tax believe that it is a statement of who we are as a country. We are, ideally, a place where the person who becomes wealthy does so because of hard work and industriousness. We are not a country where who you are is determined entirely by the family into which you happen to be born. In short, we are not Louis XIV’s France, a place with a gilded class of nobles. …

In my nearly decade of tax law practice, I never personally heard of one operating family farm or small business that was shut down because of the estate tax. Not one. As most estate planners who serve the ultra-wealthy would know, people who engage in complicated estate planning are quite often the aristocratically wealthy, people from families in which members have not had to work in three, four, or even five generations. …

Suppose Daddy and Mommy Warbucks buy stock in Microsoft for $10 million and it increases in value over several years to $15.6 million. They die and leave it to their son, Richie Rich Warbucks. Although that $5.6 million of appreciation was never taxed at all, Richie inherits the property with no estate tax and a $15.6 million income tax basis. When Richie sells the stock, he, like his parents, will not pay a penny of tax on that entire $5.6 million of gain. Nada. Zilch.

So, while you and I toil away at our jobs and pay income taxes equal to, say, a third of our income, Richie pays absolutely nothing solely because he was born into the Warbucks’ family.

Start powdering your wigs. Louis XIV would be proud.

One can easily foresee John Dimdahl’s next column in which he rages about “class warfare” and “liberal professors.” Yawn. mjh

Theirs

Lofty Heights

Architectural rendering software doesn’t handle people so well. Or do these units come with a robot housekeeper?

I do like the wall poster. It could be Eisenhower or Mao. Maoist metrosexuals considering The Lofts should know it’s an Eisenhower neighborhood. mjh

kitchen area
..:: The Glenwood Lofts ::..

Theirs

our own stupidity

The Albuquerque Tribune: Science By Anna Macias Aguayo, Associated Press

Federal officials are still at a loss to explain how the potentially deadly strain could be sent to more than 4,000 labs around the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is operating under the presumption that the H2N2 strain was purposefully included in the panels designed to test the labs’ proficiency in identifying viruses.

“I’m sure it was not an inadvertent use,” said Julie Gerberding, CDC director, “because it would be almost impossible to believe that they didn’t know they were dealing with H2N2.”

Mike Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said Congress should review how the strain was so easily distributed.

“We can’t have this happen,” Osterholm said. “Who needs terrorists or Mother Nature, when through our own stupidity, we do things like this?”

This Associated Press story appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune. Albuquerque Journal readers should note you didn’t see that part of the article; you only got the first 8 paragraphs which ended on a very confident “no problem here” note. mjh

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." — Sam Adams