How Low Can You Go?

Republicans are threatening retaliation against Major League Baseball if Democratic supporter George Soros is permitted to buy a team. (You think I'm kidding? Google it.) Are they nuts?

• They're messing with baseball. Not protecting it from itself, not looking out for fans. Just mucking around with it for political purposes. That's political suicide.
• They're messing with big business. It's politicized enough, but if guys like George Soros think that they're economic health is threatened by cheap politics, we're never going to have another unbought politician in this country. (there is the possibility that they're actually shilling for a better-connected potential buyer: wouldn't that be amusing?)
  
• They WON the damned elections. Probably not fairly, but they won, nonetheless. Taking revenge after you win is just mean.
  

OK: they're politically inept, economically backwards and nasty. This isn't news, except that they keep doing it over and over.... eventually, even most decent Republicans won't be able to hold their noses anymore.

Anonymity Tip

When blogging "anonymously," do not claim your blog at Technorati.

Damn, that was sloppy of me....

Sow the wind....

Apparently someone has filed an eminent domain petition against US Supreme Court Justice David Souter's home:

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Cafe" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."

I tend to agree with those commentators who say that Kelo is flawed not because it misunderstands eminent domain (which really does allow the government to supercede private property rights for just about anything it wants if it can rationalize it by public good) but because of the greater argument that the US Constitution is system of checks and balances not just between branches of government but between citizens and government, and they've now left this power unchecked.

The Future of the Republican Party

A couple of progressives went undercover at a College Republicans (CR) convention and consumed a lot of beer. In the middle of a rollicking waste of time (theirs, unless someone was paying them for this; yours, if you read the whole blog they produced), though, was a description of the rising leader of the party's youth:

Yikes... Chairman-elect Paul Gourley seemed pretty tame today at the convention, but is no stranger to tricky politics.

He trains how rig mock elections at the Leadership Institute and raised millions of dollars for CR using sketchy, misleading and sometimes just outright lies to coerce people into believing they were giving to the real GOP or even President Bush. This particularly targeted senior citizens in their 80's and 90's, and most of the money didn't even go to organizing, but direct mailing. Apparently the questioning of such tactics (with Gourley's signature) was off limits, and according to 21-year-old Tom Jardon, chairman of Florida's College Republicans, "It's that kind of thing where if you ask a question, somehow you are labeled a Democrat, which in Republican circles is the ninth circle of hell." (LA Times, June 22, 2005 by Robin Abcarian)

Unfortunately, he's also an accomplished grassroots organizer and has had great success in South Dakota on his campus and beyond expanding the CR network, building new groups and making it a stand-out state during the election. Besides the CR, he's also active in Campus Crusade for Christ and student government.

Karl Rove, Jr.....

Origins v. Beginnings

Ben Brumfield notes that the distinction between the pretext for war and the actual causes of war -- highlighted in the present by the Downing Street Memos -- has ancient roots. It sounds as though Polybius would not have bought the WMD argument....

TAANSTAAFL, etc.

[via Glenn Reynolds]
The above list is far too short to really encompass Heinlein's greatest quotations: really, it's just the Lazarus Long edition. I mean, he left off the Kiplingesque "Green Hills of Earth" (which, combined with Tolkien's verses, is pretty much responsible for "filk" music) which concludes

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Petrie's entire quotation collection, though, is big, and decidedly tilted toward libertarian atheism.

(the index of other lyrics and poetry I've posted is here)

"pig-headed mob of warmongers"

In addition to a fine news aggregator and thinker, Anne Zook has a way with vigorous language that makes me jealous. The title of this post comes from her latest roundup: "...if the Bush Administration wasn't a pig-headed mob of warmongers, we might be able to salvage something out of this mess."

Honestly, though, it's not all his and his cronies' fault. The invertebrate Congress and schizophrenic corporate media play a role too.... as do their customers/constituents.

Godless Fun

Jason Kuznicki has assembled a wonderful collection of areligious blogging, including PZ Myers' fantastic satire, "Escape from the Planet of the Hats" (which ignores, because no satire is perfect, the fact that hats are sometimes quite useful, even essential) and Steve Pavlina's wonderfully backwards conversion narrative in which, among many other things, he observes "By their words I hear that most Americans are Christian. By their actions I see that most aren’t. ... Congruency is clarity. When you get clear about what you truly believe about reality by observing your actions and admitting the deepest, darkest truths to yourself that you never wanted to face, you’ll set yourself on a path of growth that will put all your earlier accomplishments to shame." Almost sounds like he's starting his own religion, but as long as there aren't Gods involved, I guess the atheists are ok with it.

Free Advice: Reading Aloud

When reading a story aloud to a child, the character with the most lines should have the easiest voice, closest to your natural tone.

Is "a little torture" like "a little pregnant"?

[via Chris Bray, who's back at Ft. Benning]

The problem with torture:

• it's illegal
• it's uncivilized
• it makes our own citizens and soldiers more vulnerable to mistreatment justified by our bad behavior
• it doesn't produce good information
• information isn't really our problem
• it makes us look bad, and that's part of why we have a problem in the first place

Michael Benson is right: the comments are chilling. There's a running commentary about the Geneva Convention not applying to non-state, un-uniformed fighters, but what they forget is that those people still should have benefit of due process and once we've captured them (killing them in the heat of battle... unavoidable) how we treat them reflects on us and this is -- in the broadest sense -- a conflict not of bullets and bombs, but of ideas and attitudes and character. Even the Bush administration admits this, but they can't quite muster the character or ideas to actually carry the fight to the enemy.

Update: Caleb McDaniel points out that this is not a new problem for Americans, though I would like to believe that our whitewash of that aspect of our history means that we don't like the idea anymore. Of course, there's still our prison system....