Month: March 2005

I really don’t intend to bore the world with yet another essay about Terri Schiavo. All I will say about her case directly is this: contrary to what some people think, she is not “someone who just needs some help to eat.” She needs help to eat because she is beyond knowing what a spoon is, beyond knowing what food is, beyond knowing how to chew and swallow. A newborn baby can cry when it is hungry; this woman cannot. Every one of the 19 judges who has examined the medical evidence has come to the conclusion that she isn’t “in there” anymore. There’s a pretty good roundup of opinions both right and left over at The Moderate Voice (gee, whoda thought?) But it seems like the thing most people can agree on is that at this point, fifteen years and 19 judges later, Congress has no business getting involved. Judge #20 agrees, and now it is before Judges #21-23.

But the thing that absolutely horrifies me about this case is the circumstances behind the “unanimous” Senate vote that pushed the case into the Federal court system. “Unanimous,” in this case, meant 3 votes. There was no quorum (def. 2). There wasn’t even a minyan. When all was said and done, they didn’t even manage to get together half of of the House of Representatives. This brings me to a scary question:

If 3 guys can get together on the Senate floor and pass any darn thing they want, what exactly is there to stop them from getting 3 guys to do the same on the House floor and ram though any darn thing the President wants?

And that, esteemed reader, is why “activist judges” are so important.

You would never know there were any real problems in this nation to look at the Congress the last few days.

First, a House committee decided to investigate steroid use in pro baseball. If they are investigating this from the standpoint of employers abusing their employees, perhaps they should remember that the employees in question are a bunch of college educated millionaires. If Congress cares so much about workplace conditions, maybe they should look to the conditions that average American workers endure. If, rather, the argument is that teenage athletes are emulating the dangerous behavior of the pros, I would like to remind Congress that every teenage athlete has parents. It is Mom and/or Dad’s job to be clued in enough to say “These pills are dangerous and you will not be using them.” (Just like it’s Mom and/or Dad’s job to control what kids watch on the TV, not some “organization,” not the cable company, not the FCC. But that’s another story.)

As if this were not a big enough waste of Congress’s time and our tax dollars, they now want to subpoena a brain-dead woman to testify about…. uh, something. This is by Bill Frist’s own admission nothing more than a scheme to prevent her feeding tube from being removed, despite multiple court orders allowing it. In the time it has taken to write this post, yet another court has ordered the feeding tube removal take place.

Will they hold her in contempt of Congress for refusing to talk?

Never mind Social Security, the Federal Budget, the War in Iraq, the War on Terror, the misuse of Federal funds to produce propaganda designed to look like news, the fact that a gigolo was allowed within meters of the President of the United States on a regular basis with a daily press pass under a fake name, the fact that corrupt and unqualified judicial candidates may be rammed through the Senate, the fact that the CIA is allowed to outsource torture, ethics problems within the House, or any of the other things Congress could be addressing right now. Please, pay attention to the Congressional testimony of the millionaire drug users.

This morning, the Senate passed the steaming pile of excrement known as bankruptcy reform legislation. The votes of individual Senators can be found right here. I am willing to cut Ms. Clinton of New York a bit of slack for not voting only because her husband is in the hospital. Notice that not a single Republican voted against this gift to the credit card industry at the expense of taxpayers. Then notice the number of “Yea” votes that came from people with a “D” after their name. These people will henceforth be known as Democrats In Name Only, or DINOs. And just like DINOsaurs, they need to be on the lookout for mass extinction.

Make no mistake, this thing is bad, bad, bad. It means that if a judge thinks a person filing bankruptcy can come up with $100 per month, he will be paying most of the mountain of debt that he is buried under. It makes no difference whether he racked up those debts because he was called up to National Guard active duty in Iraq and therefore wasn’t working his regular job despite the fact that his family had their regular bills. It makes no difference whether he had a catastrophic illness that limited his ability to work and drained his bank account. It makes no difference that he is one of the many people who have been unemployed for over six months. It makes no difference that thanks to the magic of compound interest, he has paid several times what he charged on his credit cards and still owes as much as he charged. It makes no difference that she is a single mom working 2 jobs, worrying about reliable childcare, and unable to afford a lawyer to go after the deadbeat ex-husband who hates her more than he loves his own kids. It makes no difference that he lost a lot of money trying to start a business that would have given jobs to people in his community if only it had succeeded.

Oh, none of this applies if you are wealthy enough to set up an asset protection trust.

Yes, there are a lot of bankruptcies in this country. A Senate that really wanted to lower that number would be thinking about regulating credit card interest and creating more quality, good paying jobs (the kind that include health insurance for the whole family).

Shame, shame on every one of the 74 Senators who voted for this stain on the American Dream.

But back to the DINOs, the most shameful of the bunch. I have a message for them: Don’t think that the “New Democrats” over at the DLC will save you. And don’t sit back and smugly remark that it will take more than a couple of bloggers to bring you down. The guy you need to worry about is the head of the Democratic Party. I finished reading Howard Dean’s book earlier this week, along about the time you voted to stop debate on amendments. It’s a little fluffy — if you are pressed for time, flip to chapter 6 — but it had some really good points, the best of which is that everybody in the Democratic Party needs to remember the people. Here’s a little quote from page 170:

For one thing, there is no reason not to pose primary challenges to Democratic incumbents who vote with the Republicans on critical Democratic priorities.

Biden and company, you’ve got almost a year to straighten up and try to get the target off your back. Not even Lieberman voted for this dog. We The People don’t care how much money the credit card companies gave you, the fact is they can’t vote.

Our elected officials sometimes forget one important fact: people vote. Unions and special interest groups and churches do not vote, but their members do. Manufacturers and banks and stores do not vote, but their employees and customers do. Today I would like to focus on just a few instances where our “elected” lawmakers are actively working against the best interests of the citizens who put them where they are.

Since certain provisions of the controversial PATRIOT Act are set to expire, the push to make Congress renew and expand the whole darn thing is on. Yes, the man who brought us the torture memos, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, feels that despite the fact that the law “makes it easier for law-enforcement authorities to eavesdrop and to seize business and personal records,” it just doesn’t go far enough. I particularly like this article for saying “Gonzales said he was not aware of a single civil rights violation connected to the Patriot Act,” and then going on to discuss Jose Padilla — who might be a very bad man with an impossible plan to blow up multiple apartment complexes — saying “Gonzales conceded that the government might have a tough time making a criminal case against Padilla because of the way evidence against him was gathered.”

So we didn’t violate his civil rights, just his Constitutional ones.

Then we have the pending bankruptcy “reform” legislation being considered by the Senate as I write this. This bill is just plain bad. Even conservative sources like Newsday call this stinker a “gift to the rich, burden to the poor.” What, you don’t think Kenny Lay or Bernie Ebbers will have to give up their multi-million dollar houses if they file for bankruptcy to get out of paying damages from shareholder lawsuits, do you? US News and World Report does a nice job of just presenting the facts, harsh as they may be. Here’s The Phladelphia Enquirer and part of an ongoing series by the LA Times. Here’s an item from Elizabeth Warren, probably the one person who knows more about bankruptcy in this country that anybody else. Two flawed attempts to add a hike in the minimum wage to this stinker have been defeated. But in the end, guess what might really bring down this steaming pile of a bill: a provision about whether or not “violent anti-abortion protesters” would have to pay fines and penalties incurred while breaking the law.

I haven’t even discussed Social Security (Republicans who support private/personal accounts won’t even answer direct questions about how that “fixes” the expected shortfall), or any of the other tenets of the “Ownership Society.”

Seems more like a pwnership society to me.

On the state level, you have multiple states in a race to the bottom making special tax deals to attract one large employer, Intel. The Pheonix Business Journal puts it very honestly: ” Semiconductor kingpin Intel Corp. is sending a not-so-subtle ultimatum to state lawmakers: Give the company a tax break or risk losing out on the chance for a $4 billion production expansion.” At the same time, Intel is trying to strongarm Oregon into a huge tax break.

I am generally against tax gifts for big entities. First of all, they say loudly and clearly that if you are big enough, you are above the law. How then can we act surprised when they violate other laws? Second, they discount the costs involved in keeping that big employer around: road maintenance, infrastructure improvements, and (in the case of certain employers) state services to employees. Yes, they will give jobs to taxpayers, but at what net cost? Third, it is unfair to smaller employers who also provide jobs to taxpayers, but must compete while paying higher expenses. And finally, there is really no guaranty that the big employer will stay around one second longer than is legally required. Unfortunately, nobody has the guts to say “No, you will play by the rules like everybody else.”

In closing, I bring you two things: the National Security Archives, and having an affair with an employee is always “bad judgment.”