Tag Archives: politics

Abstinence-Supporting GOP State Lawmaker Admits To Sex With 22-Year-Old Intern

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Let me be perfectly clear.  I have little interest in the private lives of celebrities and other public figures.  I resent the way they are treated as news equal to events like the protests over the Iranian elections, the global economic crisis or the H1N1 virus.  I don’t think the sexual daliances of politicians or celebrities are anyone’s business outside the circle of family and friends immediately affected.
Unless, of course, the politician is one of those bent on regulating what other Americans do in their bedrooms or with their bodies.   Tennessee State Senator Paul Stanley is one of those.

He’s a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is “a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school.”…Stanley recently sponsored a bill designed to prevent gay couples from adopting children. And when a Planned Parenthood official recently sought his support for family planning services for Memphis teens, Stanley told her, according to the official, that he “didn’t believe young people should have sex before marriage anyway, that his faith and church are important to him, and he wants to promote abstinence.”

But Senator Stanley has

admitted to having a “sexual relationship” with a 22-year-old female intern working in his office, and to taking nude pictures of her in “provocative poses” in his apartment.

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works as a financial adviser for the Stanford Financial Group, whose founder, Allen Stanford, has been charged with orchestrating an $8 billion scam.

There are more delightful tidbits about Stanley’s life in the article from TPMMuckraker.  It’s rather Jerry Springer, in fact.  But you can read it there.
My point here is that once again this unbeliever finds himself quoting scripture to those “pious” souls who would regulate everyone by their own standards of morality.  “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone.” John 8 1-11.  Or perhaps ““Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” (Luke 6: 36-38) Then there is How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Luke 6: 42)
Or maybe just some good old fashioned fold wisdom.  “Practice what you preach!  (and what you want to compel others to practice, too!)

A Good Article on Liz Cheney and Her Criticism of Obama on Foreign Policy

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Well this is comforting.  In my RSS feed from The Guardian I found this article by Matthew Harwood analyzing another article by Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice-President, criticizing recent speeches made by President Obama on US relations with the rest of the world.  Apparently Cheney has declared herself open to running for political office and it appears her philosophies are very close to those of her father.
So to the extent that familiarity is comforting and better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, we’ll have the possibility of a continuing dynasty including both the Bush girls AND the Cheneys!  Well, at least it will be progress in that the heirs to the dynasty will be women.
Cheney sees the view in simple us v. them terms, just like her father.  Harwood explains,

Her argument is as simplistic as it is ridiculous: Obama doesn’t spread the myth of American exceptionalism and thus engages in historical revisionism, which emboldens our enemies and hurts America. A high-level official in the Bush state department and a ferocious defender of her father’s legacy, Cheney sees Obama’s recent speeches in Trinidad and Tobago, Cairo and Moscow as either “an attempt to push ‘reset’ – or maybe to curry favour” with our enemies.
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According to Cheney, Obama should tell our adversaries:
“America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the cold war. The Soviets were not. The cold war ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat communism.”

I won’t go on.  Harwood’s article is the thing to read.  It’s good.

A Good Month for Twitter

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Here’s a great collection of posting about Twitter. In part because of the role it played in the crisis in Iran, it is suddenly being talked about everywhere. The Social Networking Weblog has consolidated a lot of the coverage in one posting. mouthsofthesouth.com side effects viagra Kamagra Oral Jelly is one of these well-known treatments that are used when dealing with male impotency. Online stores levitra prices mouthsofthesouth.com which sell forzest are very secure resources for buying these pills at very inexpensive and cheap prices. Always remember that this condition is unavoidable and it is up to the patients to continue with intercourse as long vardenafil cost as they want. I can’t even inform you the number of people I hear from due to this very concern. generic viagra store The most interesting perspective is Iran: Just What Twitter Needed?
Of course what all this coverage of Twitter and other social networking sites is neglecting is the large number of Farsi/Persian social networking sites. But that is for another post.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

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The United States is in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, the likes of which many would argue we haven’t seen since the great depression.   Unemployment rates are very high and jobs scarce.  Many of my closest friends are unemployed and so many of us suffer from crushing debt brought on by predatory lending practices.  We are still embroiled in two conflicts overseas and extracting our forces from Iraq has proven more challenging than many thought.  And there are any number of issues.
And yet I regularly feel a surge of patriotism I have not felt for quite some time.  On November 4th, 2008, I and a few million other of my fellow Americans went to the polls and elected an African-American to be President of the United States.  Rarely, if ever, in modern history, has a member of a minority population been legitimately elected to lead a nation.  African-Americans were brought to this country as slaves, now an African-American is President.  Whether you voted for Obama or not, the historic nature of the Obama presidency is a reason for pride.
Moreover, Obama calls us toward an America, indeed a world, in which America’s greatness stems less from its strength in arms than from the strength of the ideas on which this nation was founded, a vision of democratic governance and of civil rights for all.  When our founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, they wrote

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Let’s ignore the inconvenient reference to only men.  Masculine pronouns have generally been used to refer the whole and they do in most languages.  This was especially true in 1776.  And while later in history Africans would be defined in fractions of a person, they were treated even worse, little better than chattle.  But that distinction is not made in the words here and the fact that it was the case only makes the election of Obama all the more significant.
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…we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.  On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.  We remain a young nation.  But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.  The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation:  the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation we understand that greatness is never a given.  It must be earned.  Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less.  It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.  Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor — who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

I am not naive and I am not wearing rose colored glasses.  I have already been disappointed by some of the administration’s policies, and know I will be again.  I fully expect it to falter and to diappoint.  And when it does, I will raise my voice in protest.  But this is the real world.  Politics move slowly and their will be trade offs.  But I choose not to focus on that today.  I choose to focus on the promise of America.  Today is the day we celebrate the United States and the American Dream!  Happy Independence Day!

Amnesty Details Violations in Gaza Assault

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This article from the Financial Times, summarizes the findings of an Amnesty International report on the Israeli invasion of Gaza in January. It is a must read.
The Israeli invasion into Gaza was launched in response to the launching of Qassam rockets into Israel by Hamas.  The report sternly denounces these attacks and

urges Hamas to renounce its policy of unlawful rocket attacks against civilian population centres in Israel and to prevent other armed groups from carrying out such attacks.

While the rockets have killed less than 20 people in Israel, the psychological effect and destruction of property has been devastating. Moreover, the rockets have no guidance system and can only be lobbed indiscriminately, recklessly endangering civilians.
But the bulk of the report’s criticism is directed at Israel for its excessive use of force. It is worth quoting Amnesty’s statement regarding the report at some length.

The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented. Some 300 children and hundreds of other unarmed civilians who took no part in the conflict were among the 1,400 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
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Amnesty International found that the victims of the attacks it investigated were not caught in the crossfire during battles between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, nor were they shielding militants or other military objects. Many were killed when their homes were bombed while they slept. Others were sitting in their yard or hanging the laundry on the roof. Children were struck while playing in their bedrooms or on the roof, or near their homes. Paramedics and ambulances were repeatedly attacked while attempting to rescue the wounded or recover the dead.
“The deaths of so many children and other civilians cannot be dismissed simply as ‘collateral damage’, as argued by Israel,” said Donatella Rovera. “Many questions remain to be answered about these attacks and about the fact that the strikes continued unabated despite the rising civilian death toll.”
More than 3,000 homes were destroyed and some 20,000 damaged in Israeli attacks which reduced entire neighbourhoods of Gaza to rubble and left an already dire economic situation in ruins. Much of the destruction was wanton and could not be justified on grounds of “military necessity”.

The Israeli Army has rejected the report saying it is “unbalanced, and wrongly interprets the law of wars.”
The full text of the report can be downloaded here (PDF).

Human Costs of Guantanamo Prison

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Camp DeltaThe closing of “Gitmo” is long overdue, there is no doubt about it. But shutting it down is more difficult than one might think. This post contains two articles that illustrate the problem. They are not the best or the most compelling, they are simply the two that showed up on my computer screen today. Tomorrow there will be another. Where are those people to go? In some cases they have to homes to return to, in others they are persecuted in their home country. In other cases their country of origin doesn’t want them back. Others are stateless.
We have prisoners who have been detained there since the beginning of our invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan who have never been charged with a crime and who, in many cases, are innocent. But if it is true that prisoners in the regular American penal system are hardened by the system and more likely to be come recidivist, what happens when that facility is a military run prison camp. And what happens with the prisoner, once just a taxi driver or farmer in the wrong place at the wrong time, is locked up next to folks who are, in fact, ruthless radical religious terrorists? What is that person going to think of Western democracy and Western systems of justice when he spends years in a prison without even the semblance of due process? I shudder to think!
Italy to take Guantanamo detainees
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Tell your senators: Support a Strong Public Healthcare Option

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This is an extremely important issues.  Americans need to be able to be able to fall back on a public insurance plan that would provide quality, affordable care.  But, private insurers have spent millions of dollars  promoting “reform” of the current system that really changes very little and still leaves corporations making decisions in charge of our health care decisions.
Right now, only 36 senators are on record supporting a public option.  The link below will take you to a site called CREDO action that will help you contact your senator on the issue.
Tell your senators: Support a Strong Public Healthcare Option.
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