Month: June 2006

SCOTUS Says Political Gerrymandering Is Okay — So Dems Should Have At

Jon Ponder

The Supreme Court upheld former GOP House Speaker Tom DeLay’s political gerrymandering of voter districts in Texas today. The redistricting scheme enacted by Republicans in the Texas legislature in 2003 resulted in a five seat pickup for the GOP in the Texas delegation to the U.S. House in 2004.

I certainly hope the Democrats in the California legislature are watching this. In 2001, despite the fact that Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature as well as the governor’s mansion and every statewide elected office, the legislature left GOP districts across the state intact. California picked up a House seat that year, which the legislature added in Orange County, which was once a GOP bastion.

What are the chances they’ll be that magnanimous next year if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger loses to Democrat Phil Angelides?

Is Markos Marsupialopolis Gay, as Instapundit Graciously Refrained from Implying?

Jon Ponder

From the Poor Man Institute:

Q: Is Markos Marsupialopolis gay, as Instapundit graciously refrained from implying?

A: No. This is a common misconception, fostered by Hollywood’s deliberate policy of putting out that gay cowboy movie around about the same time they were putting out all those damn Hobbit movies. Let’s clear this up once and for all: cowboys are gay. Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. Hobbits, on the other hand, just like going on extended backpacking holidays with their live-in male gardeners, during which they exchange soulful and significant glances and cry and hug and say “oh, Sam!” in a way which, if they were cowboys, would be totally gay, but, seeing as they are hobbits, just totally isn’t. Then the gardener marries the girl from scene 2 who didn’t get any lines, and then Frodo, the confirmed bachelor, goes on a permanent boating holiday with a bunch of “elves”. Dead butch behavior if you ask me.

Q: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that all cowboys are gay?

A: Until someone can show me a hobbit cowboy, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.

Q: John Wayne?

A: Totally gay. You didn’t know that? I thought everybody knew that.

Q: Gene Autry?

A: Gay.

Q: Calamity Jane?

A: A dude.

Q: Butch Cassidy?

A: Gay. Oddly enough, though, the Sundance Kid was completely straight. The Wild West was a queer old place.

Q: Huh?

A: Huh?

Q: Wha’?

A: Wha’?

Q: Dude, I’m so lost. Why are we talking about gay cowboys, again?

A: Beats me. Say, can I interest you in a subscription to The New Republic?

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Bolshevism is knocking at our gates, we can’t afford to let it in …. We must keep America whole and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy.

— Al Capone (1899-1947), American gangster, contribution to “Liberty” magazine

CBP Goes Hard On Limbaugh’s Viagra

Buck Banks

Stiff security: Professional prick Rush Limbaugh was detained yesterday for more than three hours after Customs and Border Protection agency staff discovered a vial of the prescription drug Viagra in his carry-on luggage as he was passing through Palm Beach International Airport, according to a report in the Miami Herald. Limbaugh admitted in 2003 that he was addicted to prescription painkillers and received barely a slap on the wrist last April by the courts for perpetrating prescription fraud.

And now everybody know that he’s a liar who can’t get it up.

Perhaps the Oxycontin makes it hard for Rush to get his little soldier to come to attention, hence the vial of little blue pills. The problem with the vial of lead in your pencil? Had a name other than Rush’s on the bottle, which is a misdemeanor. The explanation:

A doctor had prescribed the drug, but it was ”labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes,” Roy Black, Limbaugh’s attorney, said in a statement, according to The Associated Press.

Hey, that privacy thing worked out really well.

The lie on the label reminds us of how he got multiple Oxycontin prescriptions from four different doctors — by lying. Rush Limbaugh is a victim — of instant karma. By being who he is — a reprehensible rightwing blowhard who appeals to the reptilian brain stems of his mouthbreathing listeners — Limbaugh has brought bad joss on himself. And now everybody know that he’s a liar who can’t get it up.

Is Heterosexuality a Lifestyle Choice?

Jon Ponder
Conservatives’ internalized homophobia is like bulimia of the spirit. Its victims starve their psyches by regurgitating their self-loathing.

A new study has identified a small but significant biological factor that influences the sexual identity of males. The study proves that “having one or more older brothers boosts the likelihood of a boy growing up to be gay — an effect due not to social factors, but biological events that occur in their mother’s womb…”

While the study does not provide the ultimate proof that sexual orientation is innate, it does offer definitive evidence that biological forces have a role.

This is significant because, according to a 2003 Pew poll, 42 percent of Americans believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice — and it is among this group that we find the conservatives’ consensus of opposition for equal treatment under the law for gay people.

What fascinates me about rightwingers’ belief that sexual orientation is a choice is that, while they project this decision making onto those of us who grew up to be gay, they are apparently blind to the converse decision-making that it implies about themselves.

If homosexuals “decide” to be gay, then the corollary must be true: Heterosexuality must be a lifestyle choice, too.

What this means is that, at some point in their lives, these conservatives seriously considered becoming gay but then decided to pass.

This decision must have been wrenching. And over time, their suppressed desires turned into self-loathing — a disgust which they came to project onto others who, they believe, did not have the fortitude to conquer their attraction for members of their own gender.

This internalized homophobia is like bulimia of the spirit. Its victims starve their psyches by regurgitating their self-loathing.

Truly straight people do not — cannot — make a choice about their sexual orientation, just as gay people don’t, and can’t, choose. People who are comfortable in their own sexual personae are not threatened by the way the sexuality of others is expressed.

Nonpartisan Study Says 80% of New Voting Equipment Is Vulnerable to Fraud

Jon Ponder

A yearlong study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the vast majority of electronic vote-counting systems deployed across the United States can be manipulated by hackers:

Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election “pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections,” a report out Tuesday concludes.

There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study… says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities.

The study, which took more than a year to complete, examined optical scanners and touch-screen machines with and without paper trails. Together, the three systems account for 80 percent of the voting machines that will be used in this November’s election.

Is The Daily Show Poisoning Democracy?

Buck Banks

Spreading cynicism: On Friday, The Washington Post’s columnist Richard Morin wrote, “This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.” Wow, that’s heavy, and it’s one of Editor-In-Chief Jon’s favorite shows — when he can stay up late enough to watch it.

Appears Morin was bloviating about a supposed study by a couple of political scientists from East Carolina University that allegedly found that “young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, The Daily Show, develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.” Previous research among college students found that 48 percent of them watched The Daily Show and only 23 percent of them followed “hard news” programs closely.

Young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, The Daily Show, develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

Puh-leeze! And Stewart makes them not read newspapers by the droves, too, I suppose. The slack-ass voting habits of college students is a big story — every election year — and it hasn’t changed since I had hair down to my shoulders and was politically poisoned by Chevy Chase’s cynical impersonation of a clumsy President Gerald Ford on Saturday Night Live.

So these yahoo perfessors did a speriment:

To test for a “Daily Effect,” [Jody] Baumgartner and [Jonathan S.] Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from “The CBS Evening News” to another group. Then they measured the students’ attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart’s program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers’ article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

“Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls,” they wrote.

Come on, maybe they just felt the choice sucked so much that voting seemed rather pointless. I know I did. How can anyone remain uncynical in this postmodern national political environment where partisanship and pandering are exceeded only by cronyism, fraud, influence for sale, malfeasance and the president rules absolutely?

Au contraire. I think Jon Stewart is performing a public service by showing the boobs and crooks who run this country for the bozos they are. Come on, college kids, let’s give Jon a big hip, hip, hooray! Hello? Kids? Are you out there?

DoD: We’re Just Making the Jihad Worse by Calling It a ‘Jihad’

Buck Banks

Name game: As if the Department of Defense didn’t have better things to do — like, say, creating an exit strategy for Iraq — they’ve had a couple of staffers looking at the language gubmint officials use to describe events and characters revolving around the war on terror, or “terr,” as POTUS pronounces it. They’ve come up with a handy miscellany of terms that will win the war of words even as we lose the battle for hearts and minds.

In dealing with Islamic extremists, the West may be giving them the advantage due to cultural ignorance, maintain Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV. The men work at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.

The two believe the right words can help fight the global war on terror. “American leaders misuse language to such a degree that they unintentionally wind up promoting the ideology of the groups the United States is fighting,” the men wrote in an article titled “Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism.”

Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.

An example is jihadist. Most of us take jihadist or jihadi to mean an Islamic extremist who is fighting a holy war. But Steusand and Tunnell maintain that in Arabic jihad “literally means striving and generally occurs as part of the expression, Jihad fi sabil illah, striving in the path of God.” Which is considered a good thing for Muslims to do.

According to Islamic scholars, the correct term for Islamic extremists is hirabah, which identifies those engaged in sinful warfare that is contrary to Islamic law. Steusand and Tunnell offer some other examples of western semantic screw-ups:

Another word constantly misused in the West is mujahdeen. Again, in American dictionaries this word refers to a holy warrior � again a good thing. So calling an al Qaeda terrorist a mujahid legitimizes him. The correct term for these killers is mufsidun, Streusand and Tunnell say. This refers to an evil or corrupt person. “There is no moral ambiguity and the specific denotation of corruption carries enormous weight in most of the Islamic world,” they wrote.

People can apply other words instead. “Fitna/fattan: fitna literally means temptation or trial, but has come to refer to discord and strife among Muslims; a fattan is a tempter or subversive,” they wrote. “Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.”

Finally, Steusand and Tunnell urge Westerners to translate Allah into God. They argue that using Allah to refer to God is like using Jehovah to refer to a Hebrew God. What’s wrong with that? Fact is, Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the God of Abraham, but, say our intrepid translators, using different names serves to exaggerate divisions among the religions.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it, Messrs. Steusand and Tunnell. To say that after five years of verbally sparring with the hirabas, we’re going to change the rules of engagement by changing the terms and they’re just going to see that we “get it” and come crawling out of their caves to stop sewing fitna and quit being fattan and give up being mufsidun? Sounds about as effective as the rest of the DoD’s antiterrorism arsenal.