Considerettes

More fallout from the war, the good kind. Doom-sayers insisted that the war in Iraq would destabilize the region. Turns out it did, but not the way they thought. One regime that was in desperate need of destabilization was Libya, and Junkyard Blog details how that’s good for everybody.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is channelling Judge Roy Moore:

Newsom argues homosexuals should be able to marry based on the California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. The 36-year-old mayor, who began his term Jan. 8, insists he merely is fulfilling his duty.

Quoting Moore during the height of the 10 Commandments Monument flap:

“Like all judges in the state of Alabama, I’m sworn to uphold the constitution of the state of Alabama,” Moore has declared. “Like all judges state and federal, I’m sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Those constitutions are premised on a belief in God. I am bound by my conscience to acknowledge that God upon whom that oath depends. I’m committed to do my duty.” .

I’d love to hear what Newsom’s view of Moore was.

There’s an interesting debate on NRO’s The Corner blog about the “gay marriage” licenses being handed out by the mayor of San Francisco. It’s basically NRO v Andrew Sullivan, the battle of the conservatives. I think the NRO folks make a better case, but they link to Sullivan’s posts so you can judge for yourself. The most recent NRO post on it is here, but Stanley Kurtz posted a whole bunch on it starting here (that’s the first post in the bunch; scroll up to go in chronological order)

…and speaking of vanity, here’s the first entry in what I’m dubbing “Considerettes Radio”. What I’m planning on doing is occasionally getting on a radio show and spew my right-wing venom discuss issues I’ve covered on this blog. What’s my purpose in doing this? I dunno, maybe hearing it instead of reading it will make it more persuasive. Or maybe I’m making audition clips for my own wildly popular radio talk show. Regardless, hope y’all get a little kick out of me making a fool of myself on the air.

This was recorded this afternoon on WGST on the Kim Peterson show. I talked about the topic of a previous blog entry where a woman from Boulder, Colorado said she handed out same-sex marriage licenses back in 1975 and stopped when, among other things, a man wanted to marry his horse. Items to note:

• The item was not from a Boulder newspaper website, it was an AP news wire item on the San Jose Mercury News site with a dateline of Denver.
• I was driving home from work, so I apologize for the stammering. (But I did use the hands-free earpiece on my cell phone.)
• There’s a small skip in the audio where I mentioned that the state attorney general declared that marriage was between a man and a woman (but if you read the article, you knew that.)
• My web host doesn’t do streaming MP3 audio, so you gotta download the whole enchilada before you hear it.
• The clip comes with a free English lesson from Mr. Peterson himself.

“Considerettes Radio” on The Kim Peterson Show (WGST, Atlanta, GA) 2/16/2004 5:40pm EST (254K)

UPDATE: Much thanks to Junkyard Blog for the link here. Will we start hearing your voice on the radio soon? 🙂

Lesson 1 in the “separation of church and state” issue: Would any of these depictions of religion in our nation’s capitol pass ACLU muster? Answer: Most likely not. Follow-up question: Then what do the folks at the ACLU know about the First Amendment that its writers didn’t?

Same-sex marriage licenses a new thing? Not according to former Boulder, Colorado County clerk and recorder Clela Rorex.

As a newly elected political rookie in 1975, Rorex was approached by a same-sex couple who asked if she would issue a marriage license. After securing a legal opinion from the Boulder County district attorney at the time, who said state law did not preclude issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Rorex issued the license.

She’s very proud of what she did, “prouder than ever”, to be a precursor to what is happening now. But will she continue to be proud when things continue now as they did then?

Soon after [a ruling by the state attorney general that marriage was a union between a man and a woman], Rorex stopped issuing licenses, especially after a man came in trying to get a license for himself and his horse, Dolly. Rorex told him the horse was too young to get married without parental consent.

Not that it was nutty, not that it was immoral, but simply because of the age of the horse.

“I issued licenses because I didn’t want to be legislating morality,” Rorex said, adding she knew little about homosexuality at the time and did not know many gay people.

I have a feeling she knew little about what she was really doing to society, if it turns out the only reason to preclude a man/horse marriage is a question of age. She got a peek down the slippery slope, and promptly shut her eyes.

It’s nice to know that Kerry is asking Democrats to stop the AWOL jabs at Bush, although I wonder who’s listening. Will Terry McAuliffe? Or how about the Washington Press corps (who (and I love to keep pointing this out) ABC News itself said has “a good number of biases and predilections”, all on the liberal side of things).

Kudos to Kerry. Now, let’s see if it makes any difference at all. It’s time to get our history straight.

Well, and perhaps Kerry needs a lesson in this area himself. In the same news article that reported Kerry’s wish to stop the AWOL charge, there was this:

Still, Kerry claimed Bush failed to apply Vietnam lessons to Iraq, and he referred derisively to “Richard Nixon and his war in Vietnam” – though it actually began under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson or, some say, President John F. Kennedy.

Seeing this doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy about Kerry truly giving Bush a fair treatment, although he’s working on it, it seems.

Looks like Alexandra Polier has come out to categorically deny a relationship with John Kerry. I can take that at face value, although, as is noted in today’s AP story (emphasis mine),

In a separate statement, Polier’s parents, Terry and Donna Polier of Malvern, Pa., dismissed the “completely false and unsubstantiated” allegations about their daughter.

“We love and support her 100 percent and these unfounded rumors are hurtful to our entire family,” the statement said. “We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation, and intend on voting for him for president of the United States.”

The statement did not address purported quotes by Polier’s parents in the British tabloid The Sun that were harshly critical of Kerry.

The original statements can be found here. There’s that, and the original comment from Wesley Clark that took this story from the rumor mill (it had been going around before Clark said anything) to full-fledged story (and I don’t hear any Democrat yet dissing Clark over rumormongering; that charge they leave for Matt Drudge who had the audacity to report what a presidential candidate said). I’m not going to consider this an issue unless more comes of it, but those two items are annoying, and ought to be so even for Kerry supporters.

(And then reports like this show up, saying that an American TV network has a taped interview of Polier from last December discussing her relationship with Kerry.)

UPDATE: …and then reports like this appear where TIME magazine (that bastion of right-wing ideological reporting…or not) says of Miss Polier, “She would joke that she was dating the next president of the United States, says a source.”

And reports like this from the BBC that quote a Washington Post London correspondent:

“We’ve been down this road many, many times before. We are extremely reluctant to follow this kind of thing up unless there is a really, really compelling public interest. We don’t feel there is any reason to until it reaches a threshold.

“All we have at the moment is that the woman’s parents, who are republicans, don’t like Senator Kerry.

Except they just got through saying they liked Kerry and planned on voting for him. But this contradiction doesn’t rise to the level of “news” for the WaPo folks.

I know, I know, I just finished saying I wasn’t going to consider this an issue until more real information came out, but the contradictions in this story keep popping up faster than the Whack-A-Mole game at Six Flags. It’s worth keeping in the back of your mind for later when the press incessantly needles Bush over a story with far fewer contradictions.

John Hawkins has it right about the Janet Jackson exposure at the Super Bowl. If nudity on the most-watched TV show of the year isn’t the line of demarcation, what is? Do folks who are so condescending about the whole thing have any standard? Is there any line at all for them?

I have a Linux machine at home and one of the things I do with it is capture the audio stream of a number of radio shows with a bit of software called “Streamripper“. I like using it under Linux because I can run a periodic “cron” job to run Streamripper at different times during the day, rather than do it manually on a Windows machine. My wife asked me why I do this, and I told her it’s to record the hour or two of shows that, based on my schedule, I might actually call in and get on the air to say something. (I’ve actually been on the Sean Hannity show, but only for the 5 seconds each person gets during his “Trash the Lines” segment. I’ve also been on Doug Stephan’s “Good Day” a couple of times, but alas he doesn’t send out a Shoutcast-type audio feed that Streamripper could pick up.) If I do get anything on the air relative to things I’ve been blogging about, I thought it’d be cool to make them available here.

She looked at me, smiled, and asked with a chuckle, “Isn’t that kinda’ vain?”

I replied, “Well, no more so than having a blog.” >grin<