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

Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase

worst human bite – #9 on Comcast Search

Happy 7th Birthday, …

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

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

The stifling of diss…

The stifling of diss…
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.)

Blog Upgrade Update:…

Blog Upgrade Update:…
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!

It’s about time, but…

It’s about time, but…
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.

While you slept last…

While you slept last…
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”?

Israel gets it.Israe…

Israel gets it.Israe…
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.

Now that legal exper…

Now that legal exper…
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.)

Well, that didn’t ta…

Well, that didn’t ta…
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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