Considerettes

conservatives are immoral and un-American!!! [#3 on Google]

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worst human bite - #9 on Comcast Search

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Happy 7th Birthday, Blogger! I’ve been with them for 4.5 of those years.

(OK, and I’m planning on leaving them soon.)

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The stifling of dissent, Democrat-style.

…[T]his week in one of the boldest moves yet by a sitting liberal, Democrat California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez proclaimed, “The real purpose of SB 1437 is to outlaw traditional perspectives on marriage and family in the state school system.”

He continued, “The way you correct a wrong (perspective) is by outlawing. ‘Cause if you don’t outlaw it, then people’s biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view.”

Nunez’s solution to the people he disagrees with is to outlaw their ability to disagree with him.

And Nunez’s viewpoint is one that pervades liberals in his party and in the nation. That is why Nunez and his fellow Democrats in the California State Assembly voted in unison to pass four bills that are all designed to punish people who disagree with them. To incarcerate someone for daring to criticize a different point of view � over a purely behavioral issue.

The bills in question have passed both houses and await Gov. Schwarzenegger’s signature or veto. The bills were unanimously embraced by the Democrats and universally denounced by the Republicans.

Read the whole thing for the details on those four bills. In summary, they are designed to promote homosexuality as a lifestyle in the schools (in rather graphic detail), and to punish anyone who dares speak against it.

Some have said that it’s just a matter of time before the public accepts homosexual marriage. Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before it’s fully forced on the public, and the public loses its will to fight.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

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Blog Upgrade Update: Things are moving along nicely. I’ve settled on WordPress, I’ve settled on a theme (Tiga), and I’ve got the theme working. I had a big problem in customizing it until I made a small change to the files. (Geek Speek: The theme has a special page it adds to WordPress theme administration where you fill in values for the stylesheet, which it then uses in the dynamic stylesheet style.php. Problem was that style.php was calling PHP’s output buffering routines, and for some reason, possibly related to my hosting system, nothing at all would come out. Thus, my page had no styles at all. I commented out the buffering calls, and voila. I’ll probably do what the theme author suggests and, once I have my layout pretty much set, run style.php, save the output as style.css, and then use that for the style sheet. Static pages, of course, respond faster than program output, and I have noticed that sometimes the program is too slow and again no style it output.)

WordPress has an option to require you to register (just nickname & e-mail) before you can post comments, and as annoying as I know that can be, I also know how much spam is a problem, even with countermeasures. (I’ve been the main spam handler at Stones Cry Out.) At the start, I’m going to make registration optional; anyone will be able to post as long as they enter a name and e-mail. Your first post will be automatically moderated, but once you have an approved post, you’ll be able to post unmoderated (well, depending on content, of course) as long as you use the same e-mail address. I’ve added a plug-in to allow you to subscribed to comments to a post (you’ll get an e-mail when they come in), so if you’re really interested in a topic, you can keep up with what other folks are saying.

You’ll still be able to register, and that’ll bypass (I think) the first-post-moderation step. It’ll also remove the requirement to put your name and e-mail address in every time you want to comment. And you’ll have a leg up if the spammers force me to the step of requiring registration.

Don’t worry about remembering all this, because I’ll give a full description of it again once the new format starts. We’re getting there!

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It’s about time, but at least it’s happening

The U.S. “catch-and-release” immigration policy has ended, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today.

Law enforcement authorities are holding nearly all non-Mexican illegal immigrants caught in the U.S. until they can be deported to their home countries, Chertoff declared.

The new “catch and detain” policy, he noted, does not apply to Mexicans, who are to be sent back immediately after being stopped by Border Patrol agents.

“Although we’re not ready to declare victory – we’ve got a lot more work to do – it is encouraging and it is something that ought to inspire us to continue to push forward,” Chertoff told reporters.

This has certainly been one of the major issues conservatives have had with the Bush administration. If they follow through with this, it’s a great step in the right direction.

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While you slept last night, the solar system lost a planet.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) - Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is - and isn’t - a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

Will Mickey Mouse’s dog have to be renamed “Neptune”?

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Israel gets it.

Israel is carefully watching the world’s reaction to Iran’s continued refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, with some high-level officials arguing it is now clear that when it comes to stopping Iran, Israel “may have to go it alone,” The Jerusalem Post has learned.

One senior source said on Tuesday that Iran “flipped the world the bird” by not responding positively to the Western incentive plan to stop uranium enrichment. He expressed frustration that the Russians and Chinese were already saying that Iran’s offer of a “new formula” and willingness to enter “serious negotiations” was an opening to keep on talking.

“The Iranians know the world will do nothing,” he said. “This is similar to the world’s attempts to appease Hitler in the 1930s - they are trying to feed the beast.”

He said there was a need to understand that “when push comes to shove,” Israel would have to be prepared to “slow down” the Iranian nuclear threat by itself.

The world will stand by and wring its hands and talk about doing something. But Israel knows two thing; one, that Iran can’t be trusted, and two, if Iran gets a nuke, Israel is most likely their first target.

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Now that legal experts have been able to go over the recent ruling on the constitutionality of the NSA wiretaps, they’re not impressed, even the ones that don’t like the wiretaps.

Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge’s conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision’s reasoning and rhetoric yesterday.

They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government’s major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions.

This from a Carter appointee. The results of a single presidential election can have ramifications long after he leaves office.

Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments.

“It does appear,” Mr. Bashman said, “that folks on all sides of the spectrum, both those who support it and those who oppose it, say the decision is not strongly grounded in legal authority.”

The main problems, scholars sympathetic to the decision’s bottom line said, is that the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, relied on novel and questionable constitutional arguments when more straightforward statutory ones were available.

Much like other liberal judges who rule based on, say, emanations and penumbras, rather than the text. The “living document” way of looking at law and the Constitution has brought us decisions that legal experts from both sides of the aisle can’t defend.

And if I may toot my own horn for just a bit, this point…

She ruled, for instance, that the program, which eavesdrops without court permission on international communications of people in the United States, violated the First Amendment because it might have chilled the speech of people who feared they might have been monitored.

That ruling is “rather innovative” and “not a particularly good argument,” Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale who believes the program is illegal, wrote on his Web log.

…sounds very much like my initial critique that her explanation made wearing a wire to a mob meeting unconstitutional. I am not a lawyer and still I managed to pick this up. This says nothing about my legal knowledge, frankly, but speaks volumes against this poor ruling.

Critics of the wiretapping also don’t understand why Judge Taylor’s ruling didn’t take into account some of the more obvious legal issues, like the FISA court law. Even supporters of the program could tick off lists of precedents that could have been used.

Supporters of the program, disclosed by The New York Times in December, suggested that Judge Taylor’s opinion was as good a way to lose as any.

“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad it is,” said John R. Schmidt, a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who says the program is legal. He pointed to Judge Taylor’s failure to cite what he called several pertinent decisions, including one from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review in 2002 that said it took for granted that Congress “could not encroach on the president’s constitutional power” to conduct warrantless surveillance to obtain foreign intelligence.

Predictably, the ACLU will take the worst ruling and frame it as wisdom from Solomon.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U., said Judge Taylor’s decision represented vindication of established limits on the scope of executive authority.

“Ultimately,” Mr. Romero said, “any doubts about the decision will be taken up on appeal by sitting federal judges rather than pundits or commentators.”

No, the doubts will most likely stick around. According to Prof. Cass Sunstein, a rather liberal law professor at the University of Chicago, the case, while he thinks it will ultimately be won by the plaintiffs, won’t be won because of anything Judge Taylor said.

“The chances that the Bush program will be upheld are not none, but slim,” Professor Sunstein said. “The chances that this judge’s analysis will be adopted are also slim.”

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

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Well, that didn’t take long.

JERUSALEM – Hezbollah has returned to many of its strongholds in south Lebanon and is capable of launching another round of attacks against the Jewish state, Israeli and Lebanese officials tell WorldNetDaily.

The statements follow scores of reports Iran and Syria are attempting to rearm Hezbollah one week after a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect following 34 days of confrontations that began when Lebanese militia ambushed an Israeli patrol unit, kidnapping two soldiers and killing eight others.

“Hezbollah has undoubtedly returned to their positions,” Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon’s Druze leader and head of the country’s Progressive Socialist Party, told WND. “They were victorious against Israel and now they are regrouping for another round, which is inevitable.”

Looks like Thomas Sowell will be shown to be right, as calling for a cease-fire is doing nothing but giving Hizbollah time to rearm for the next strike.

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Dr. Roy Spencer at TCS Daily asks “How Green is Your Church?” and hits points about global warming and the different way that Christians can react to it that we’ve covered here before. But I wanted to highlight his concluding paragraphs.

Bjorn Lomborg, a self-proclaimed environmentalist, assembled a panel of experts in economics who were charged with determining — given a fixed amount of money to be dedicated to improving the human conditions — what actions give the biggest returns for the least money. The result was the “Copenhagen Consensus“, with over a dozen policy approaches prioritized in terms of bang-for-the-buck. Fighting climate change was at the bottom of the list. Fighting malaria, AIDS, provision of clean water and other sanitation measures were a few that were at or near the top of the list.

As has often been the case where economics and policy intersect, good intentions are not enough. The lesson for the church is, while it is one thing to agree to “help the world’s poor”, it is another thing entirely to determine how to best spend limited financial resources. Unless we examine the consequences of our charitable efforts, it is entirely possible to inadvertently make matters worse, rather than better.

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I’m considering a big change to the blog. I had an issue with the Blogger template the other day when I went to add the 9/11 memorial graphic to the sidebar. The editing web page didn’t load the whole template HTML into its editing window, and when I saved it I lost a bunch of the template, including the part that showed the posts!

Did I have a backup? I’m ashamed to say “No”, and I may have to turn in my technogeek credentials. Fortunately, Google cache is my friend. I got a copy of what the page looked like before, and with that and some help from Blogger help pages got it all back up and running. (Though the Site Meter stats have been unusually low since then. Not sure if that’s related, but I think it probably is. Not sure why.)

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to either use a new Blogger layout (the one I use has long since disappears from the predefined templates Blogger lets you choose from) or go to another system. I kinda like the idea of a system that publishes static pages, so that if I move to yet another blogging system I just keep the old pages, not all the old software and its database that generates the the pages on the fly. However, most (all?) of the new software out there, and the one in particular I’ve really enjoyed messing around with (WordPress) are on-the-fly solutions. And especially if I want to have comments without using an external service, on-the-fly is the only way to go.

I’ve also wanted to buy a domain name to make the URL for the blog easier to remember, and thought that I’d do both at the same time, but that’s not a top requirement.

As I said, I’m really liking WordPress, of what I’ve heard of the 5 possible blog software solutions that my hosting software supports. It has loads of themes and plugins to work with, and I’ve been working on importing all my Blogger posts into it so that you can search all the archives from just WordPress. I’ve made sure that all my custom sidebar stuff can be moved over, and there are some nice themes. Comments would become a part of the blog, because I’ve wanted to be able to hear from y’all. I’ve enjoyed (and, yes, sometimes dreaded) comments to posts at Stones Cry Out, where I’m a contributor, and I’d like to try that here. Might make for more return visits, eh? >grin<

Anyway, just to let you know that you may see some changes coming down the pike. Next week or next month or next year? Hard to say, but I’d place my bet as between the latter two timeframes.

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North Korea is going to test a nuclear bomb?

There is new evidence that North Korea may be preparing for an underground test of a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials told ABC News.

“It is the view of the intelligence community that a test is a real possibility,” said a senior State Department official.

A senior military official told ABC News that a U.S. intelligence agency has recently observed “suspicious vehicle movement” at a suspected North Korean test site.

The activity includes the unloading of large reels of cable outside P’unggye-yok, an underground facility in northeast North Korea. Cables can be used in nuclear testing to connect an underground test site to outside observation equipment. The intelligence was brought to the attention of the White House last week.

Even before this most recent intelligence, there has been growing concern within the U.S. government that North Korea has been moving toward a nuclear test. North Korea is believed to have enough nuclear material to build as many as a dozen nuclear bombs, but it has never tested one. A successful test would remove any doubt that North Korea is a nuclear power.

But I thought Jimmy Carter gave them all sorts of aid so this wouldn’t happen! Do you mean that this is one dictator we couldn’t trust?

Who would have thought?

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A recent court ruling claims that, while a religious display might not be unconstitutional in and of itself, if too many religious people get near it, it becomes unconstitutional.

The ruling from the Fifth Court of Appeals said the display of a Bible on public ground in Houston to honor the founder of a mission has to go, not because it was unconstitutional itself, but because it became unconstitutional when a Christian group rallied around it.

The pastor’s group said that means any monument, building, or even feature of nature is an illegal “establishment of religion” if a church ceremony is held there.

“Connecting the dots between the eminent domain case, which says all of your churches are up for grabs if a town wants a mall, secondly you now have been told you do not have constitutional rights in the public square,” Dave Welch, executive director of the Houston Area Pastors Conference, told WorldNetDaily.

“Any kind of an event is okay, as long as you didn’t express any religious faith. What is that telling you?

…

Welch told WND that the court’s conclusion was “ludicrous” and if followed logically, could mean that a religious rally at any public building would therefore make the building unconstitutional so it would have to be removed.

The Bible was installed on county property about five decades ago in honor of William Mosher, the founder of Star of Hope Mission, and was replaced in 1996 with donated funds. However, an atheist challenged the monument, and on an appeal from the District Court decision that the Bible was unconstitutional, the appeals court carried the argument further.

Its ruling said that the monument became an unconstitutional “establishment” after a 2003 rally was held by Christians to defend the display. That rally involved prayers and clergy, the court noted.

“The ramifications of this tortured decision are breath-taking and without any historic or legitimate Constitutional rationale,” said the pastors’ organization. “For the court to state that if a private citizen exercises his or her First Amendment rights of religious expression and assembly on public property, that any monument, building or fixed item of any kind that contains religious references becomes ‘establishment of religion’ is simply irrational.”

Even if you don’t think that such predicted persecution “followed logically” from such a ruling, the ruling itself is awful. It’s certainly one that, if it stays in force on appeal, makes the constitutionality of any sort of religious display, even in a religious context, subject to the whims of judges. Is that what the First Amendment means by “free exercise” of religion?

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

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So much for disarmament.

Hezbollah will retain its weapons in southern Lebanon but its members will not bear them in public, according to an agreement reached yesterday after days of talks between Hezbollah representatives and the Lebanese government.

…

The Al Jazeera network yesterday reported Hezbollah’s refusal to accept any proposal involving a handover of its weapons to the Lebanese army or to UNIFIL, or allowing the Lebanese army to search its positions. The compromise reached is that Hezbollah would conduct no military activity in the south. There is to be no “show of military arms” by Hezbollah in the south, but only of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL.

Now there’s a “compromise”; keep your weapons, but just hide them better. Thank you, UN

Oh, and don’t forget a shout-out to France.

United Nations officials scrambled to put together the peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon on Thursday after France sent planning into a tailspin when announcing that it would offer just 200 soldiers.

France had been expected to lead the force with several thousand of its own troops.

And among those outdoing France in the peacekeeping department?

Bangladesh also pledged up to 2,000 troops to be deployed in Lebanon.

Once again, the UN decides that something must be done, but they just don’t want to do it, or can’t find enough folks to help out. They’ll put something together, no doubt, and consider it having done their job. Perhaps we should take France off the Security Council and put Bangladesh in their place.

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