No Shortage of Rejects to Recycle - Subtitle - Activist Judges that Bush won't Hate

Bush, short on wisdom, and long on friends to make happy, is working to stack our courts with reichwing activist judges. Call your Congressional Representatives to stop this madness.

This is a replicatoin of the MoveOn letter posted this evening:

Dear MoveOn member,

As we write this, the Senate is debating the nomination of mining and cattle industry lobbyist William Myers III for a lifetime appointment to the Circuit Court of Appeals -- the second highest court in the land. Myers is the first of 20 nominees Bush has re-submitted in his second term. All 20 repeat nominees were rejected last term by Senate Democrats (as compared to 204 judges they accepted) because these nominees consistently sided with corporate special interests over the rights of ordinary Americans.

The Senate has the power to approve or reject judicial nominations because judges -- above all else -- must be trusted by Americans on all sides to rule fairly. So why does Bush refuse to send new nominees both parties can agree on? Because while his presidency will be over in 4 years, the judges he appoints will be on the bench for the rest of their lives. This is Bush's big push to lock in his hard right, corporate-friendly ideology for decades to come -- and that is exactly why we must not back down now.

The fight begins today. The Myers vote is a key test -- and may well determine whether Bush can stack the judiciary, all the way up to the Supreme Court, with a steady stream of hard right, pro-corporate judges. It's crucial that our Senators know that we out here in America are counting on them to hold the line against all 20 of Bush's rejected, partisan judges.

Please sign today:

http://www.moveonpac.org/judges/

We will deliver your comments to your Senators before the crucial votes on these 20 judicial nominees.

Here's a brief summary of just the first three of the 20 partisan judges re-nominated by President Bush.

William Myers III has never been a judge and spent most of his career as a lobbyist for the cattle and mining industry.^[1] He has written that all habitat conservation laws are unconstitutional because they interfere with potential profit.^[2] In 2001, Bush appointed him as the chief lawyer for the Department of the Interior. In that role he continued as a champion of corporate interests, setting his agenda in meetings with former employers he promised not to speak with, and even illegally giving away sacred Native American land to be strip mined.^[3]

Terrence Boyle was a legal aide to Jesse Helms. As a judge, his signature decisions have attempted to circumvent federal laws barring employment discrimination by race, gender, and disability.^[4] His rulings have been overturned a staggering 120 times by the conservative 4th District Court of Appeals, either due to gross errors in judgment or simple incompetence.^[5]

William Pryor Jr. served as Attorney General of Alabama, where he took money from Phillip Morris, fought against the anti-tobacco lawsuit until it was almost over, and cost the people of Alabama billions in settlement money for their healthcare system as a result.^[6] He called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history," and has consistently argued against the federal protections for the civil rights of minorities, lesbian and gay couples, women, and the disabled.^[7]

If we falter now, then decades down the road dozens of judges like this will still be ruling in favor of unchecked corporate greed and against the basic principles of accountability and fairness.

The Bush Administration is prepared to stop at nothing to smash Democratic resistance and stack the courts. As President of the Senate, Dick Cheney has even threatened to push these 20 through by using a parliamentary trick so abusive even he calls it the "nuclear option." If they can get away with it, the "nuclear option" would eliminate the right to filibuster -- a rule that has allowed 40 or more Senators to keep extremists from all sides off the courts for centuries.

If that happens, when Supreme Court vacancies begin to open up in a few months there will be no motivation for Bush to nominate justices acceptable to both parties, and no ability for Democrats to oppose even the most dangerous extremists.

We must draw the line here, by stopping Bush's 20 repeat nominees. They were rejected once -- they can and must be rejected again.

Please sign the petition today:
http://www.moveonpac.org/judges/

Thanks for all that you do,

--Ben Brandzel, Eli Pariser and the whole MoveOn PAC Team
Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

Notes:

[1] "Unfit to Judge," Community Rights Council, 4/2/04.

[2] "Myers Troubling Legal Philosophy," People for the American Way.

[3] "Environmental Group Calls on Senate to Block Myers Nomination: Ethical Problems and Anti-Environmental Activism Make Him Unfit for Judgeship," Friends of the Earth, 2/5/05.

[4] "Federal Judge Terrence Boyle Unfit for Promotion to Appeals Court," People for the American Way, 2/23/05.

[5] "Eastern District of North Carolina Terrence Boyle Nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit," Alliance for Justice.

[6] Eric Fleischauer, "Pryor Called a Tobacco Sellout," Decatur Daily News, 10/30/02.

[7] Ann Woolner, "Bush Judicial Candidate Shows How Things Change," Bloomberg News, 5/16/03.

The American School System as We Know it, is Severely Broken

A friend forwarded the NYTimes editorial that reflects comments made by Bill Gates (yes, of MicroSoft fame) to some of our leaders in Washington DC. In it, we know that Mr. Gates firmly denounced the American Educational system as obsolete.

Go to Gate's web location and you can find the transcript of his talk. Here's a slice:

Yet – the more we looked at the data, the more we came to see that there is more than one barrier to college. There’s the barrier of being able to pay for college; and there’s the barrier of being prepared for it.

When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion:

America’s high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

End of slice:

Essentially, Gates is right. In a day where teachers have to stop assigning homework as leverage to gain a fair contract, our high schools are obsolete and the system in its entirety is broken. And, more of us should be completely pissed off that this is the case. Our youth, teachers, and parents are continually being underserved by a system that is antiquated and broken. Created close to 150 years ago, in an agrarian society, the students of today in no way reflect the kinds of students our children are today. Nor does our society and its needs get appropriately addressed by the schools of today.

We need a complete overhaul, and a system redesign. Unfortunately, the school system hinges on a broken administrative structure that involves districts, state governments and has a heavy burden of administrative pay outs to superintendents who accomplish next to nothing for the student they serve - particularly on a daily basis. The "system" has never been much of a system unto itself, nor has the Secretary of Education had anything more than a titular and policy making function, only marginally affecting the education of students today.

I have a lot more to write about this subject and some ideas on how to fix the broken system, but I'll have to write more when I don't have a 10 month old boy grabbing at my keyboard. Got to run and wake up the three year old before he sleeps the day away.

War? That's for the Poor

Here's another of the fun images a friend forwarded on.

This image would be good for a laugh if it weren't so sad

Got this image from a friend. Posting it because a picture is worth a thousand words.

You can be both "Right" and Wrong

Out for my morning run - long one today - bit of a pissing rain, as it seems to be this February. Got to thinking, as usual. Here's my thought for the day:

Many self proclaimed "right" wingers work to force their objectives and agenda on the masses because they truly believe they are right.

However, simply because you are speaking from the conservative "right" wing perspective, does not mean you are correct in your agenda, opinion, or assumption about a particular issue. I call this, "just because you say you are from the "right," does not mean you are correct," corollary.

There is a secondary corollary to this notion: Many of these self-appointed "leaders" swing also from the Christian side of the argument. That is, they use a "moral" approach to serving up their agenda. Hence the corollary: Just because you can quote the bible to support your viewpoint, does not mean that you are not a bigot.

That's about it to my line of thinking from the AM run, but I did slide into humming, Joe Jackson's tune "Right & Wrong," from the Big World Album. Stuck in my head, I'll leave you with the lyrics:

Stop everything
I think I hear the president
The pied piper of the tv screen
Is gonna make it simple
And he’s got it all mapped out
And illustrated with cartoons
Too hard for clever folks to understand
They’re more used to words like:
Ideology . . .
They’re not talkin’ ’bout right and left
They’re talkin’ ’bout

Right and wrong - do you know the difference
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
’tween the right and the left and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see

So what ya think
You like the yankees or the mets this year
And what about this latest war of words
And what about the commies
I saw the news last night
All illustrated with cartoons
So when they come with that opinion poll
They better not use words like
Ideology . . .
Or try to tell me ’bout the issues
Ideology . . .
Whose side are you on
We’re talkin’ ’bout

Right and wrong - do you know the difference
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
’tween the right and the left and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see

Where are we?

Right and wrong - do you know the difference
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
’tween the right and the left and the east and the west
What you know and the things that you’ll never see

Genocide? A pleasant topic for the weekend

Just wondering: How many dead bodies are requisite to certify an operation as genocide?

The number of Iraqi civilians killed so far may just amount to that, no?

According to the UN, Genocide is defined as such:

The term was coined in 1943 by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who combined the Greek word "genos" (race or tribe) with the Latin word "cide" (to kill).

After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust - in which every member of his family except his brother and himself was killed - Dr Lemkin campaigned to have genocide recognised as a crime under international law.

Genocide is... both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against humanity

Alain Destexhe

His efforts gave way to the adoption of the UN Convention on Genocide in December 1948, which came into effect in January 1951.

Article Two of the convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The convention also imposes a general duty on states that are signatories to "prevent and to punish" genocide.

Ever since its adoption, the UN treaty has come under fire from different sides, mostly by people frustrated with the difficulty of applying it to different cases.

Here are few links to help us decide:

Link 1: The Web Genocide Documentation Centre
Link 2: Genocide Watch
Link 3: Prevent Genocide International

The Makings of a Hero

Listening to Folk Songs and Beyond on 91.7. One of the talking heads had a qood question just moments ago. What happened to the living and breathing heroes? He claimed that, as it happens, many heroes of the day are fictionial. There is a tremendous dearth of real life, living and breathing heroic types.

If you were to name, or select a hero (or she-ro for those of the feminist PC ilk) that were alive today, who would it be and why?

I am going to think on it a bit and post mine later in the comments.

How do you measure high quality teaching?

I was trolling around Blogexplosion and hit on Res Publica's post re: academic mission versus freedom of speach.

I posted the following comment and hope to spark a decent conversation about how to measure high quality teaching on a college campus. This has been a sticky wicket for admistrators as well as academics for a long time. The larger question is thus: If students are responsible for their own learning, how do we measure high quality teaching that goes beyond test scores as the penultimate measure of classroom success?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Here's my comment:

Unfortunatley, the metrics used to measure performance on a college campus don't reflect the public's view of the main purpose of Higher Education. Moreover, the emphasis is on research, soft dollars attained, and being published. There needs to be a complete overhaul of how we measure quality in the faculty ranks. That said, there is no shortage of opinions about how that should be done. And many tie some kind of corporate metrics to the act, discipline, and art of teaching. High quality teaching is not measured in test output by students. Such misguided rubrics fail to realize that while teaching is the primary responsiblity of the teacher, learning is the primary responsiblity of the student. When one fails, the test scores don't corrolate.

It's Time to Stop Kicking Terri Schiavo Around for Political Aims

Comatose is no way to live. I am putting it in writing post haste - put me down if I am not cabable of living a functional, independent, coherent, vibrant life.

If god and heaven are forgiving locations, then she is on to bigger and better things. Why keep her here?

If you are in favor of keeping her artificially alive, answer the question posed in a prior post.

slice:

A Florida judge on Friday ordered the feeding tube removed from a severely brain-damaged woman in three weeks, paving the way for her husband to allow his wife to die after a long court dispute with her parents.

Fifteen years to the day since a heart attack put Theresa "Terri" Schiavo into what some doctors call a persistent vegetative state, Circuit Judge George Greer ruled the feeding tube that keeps her alive should be removed on March 18.

That would give the parents time to appeal the ruling to higher courts, and their attorney immediately made clear they planned such appeals.

End slice:

It is time to stop using Terri Schiavo as a political football.

Another great Freeway Blog Entry

Moxie Grrrl is taking grass roots to the streets in NJ. Just saw her new post along one of the byways of the Garden State.

Check it out.

Perhaps we shall try it here. The traffic sure snarls up underneath numerous over passes at rush hour.

For ideas go to the freewayblogger web location.

Smoking sucks

As if you needed another reason not to start. What I don't understand is the otherwise intelligent person sparking up a pack a day or so...particularly those in the health care industry. But then again, the tobacco industry is rather slippery and tricky - perhaps a future place of employment for talent the likes of Karl Rove, after he is done screwing our country.

My AM run occasionally takes me by one or two hospitals, and invariably, there are a number of folks near the doorways, wearing scrubs, clutching their coats, sucking on various brands of cigarettes in the pissing rain. These are people, of whom, one would think are deeply familiar with the tragedy of a long term smoking habit, and yet, there they are.

Astonishing.

Slice:

Adding to evidence that smoking is bad for a man's sex life, new study findings show that smoking may raise the risk of impotence, particularly in younger men. Yahoo! Health Have questions about your health?

Researchers found that among the more than 1,300 men they followed, those who smoked were at greater risk of erectile dysfunction (ED) than either former smokers or non-smokers.

End slice:

This is good news for Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies. Do you think Phillip Morris holds stock in pfizer?

Which is worse?

The SFChronicle has a nice post about the whole W, Rove and Co. bought press shenanigans.

The last paragraph sums it up nicely:

It's hard to say which is worse: That the White House had no idea who it was allowing to be within shouting distance of the president -- or that it knew exactly who Jeff Gannon was and why he was there.

It's Right to Die versus the Right to lifers

It is curoius how many folks, not even remotely connected nor related in any way, are concerned about the unfortunate Terri Schiavo.

Just wondering: How many folks who argue that her feeding tubes should be kept in place also support the death penalty?

Please post comment with a percentage if you hazard a guess?

TRUTH

Truth is a slave to perception.

Another thought from my AM Run

I went for a very early AM run - still dark out at the outset. And I got to thinking, per usual.

Leadership, leaders, and the positional status garnered by the post of "leader," whatever the title, has become one of the brass rings most sought after in our capitalist world. Just ask Carly Fiorina.

The derivation of the word, lead, or to lead is, I am told, a dog sledding term to identify the dog at the front. I don't particularly know if the etymology is correct. Nonetheless, I was wondering: Wouldn't it be better to be the Musher rather than the lead dog?

Yes, the lead dog has the best view and doesn't get splatered with shit, but s/he has to break the wind, is reined in, and is the first to fall through any cravasse or hazard. The Musher gets the ride and drives the whole opperation forward. Even so, one should consider the plight of the Commodore stipulated in a prior post.

Wasting Tax Payer Dollars

In today's biggest non-news event that was reported over and again by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, W suggests Putin place an emphasis on democracy...not a qualified democracy, but just a straight up, ordinary, run of the mill democracy...ya know, like ours.

Is it me, or is W's latest venture to Europe and parts abroad seem like the biggest waste of taxpayer dollars? Perhpas we should bill the trek to him as a vacation well spent.

Slice:

Putin's defense has been that Russia must adapt democracy to its own conditions and will not allow the issue to be used by other countries for their foreign policy goals.

"The fundamental principles of democracy and institutions of democracy must be adapted to the realities of Russian life today, to our traditions and our history. And we will do this ourselves," he told Slovak media on Tuesday.

A senior Bush administration official, pointing to Putin's statements to Bush in previous meetings that the Russian people have a long history of strong czars, was skeptical.

"I always get suspicious when people put any adjective in front of democracy -- People's Democracy, Proletarian Democracy, Aryan Democracy, Managed Democracy," he said.

"I am still very much for a constructive relationship with Russia: cooperate where we can but remain true to your values ... that is easy to say but hard as hell to do."

Bush said in Brussels on Monday: "For Russia to make progress as a European nation, the Russian government must renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law."

End slice:

Now correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the greater part of Russia in Asia, not Europe?

Nice little Guckert Video montage

Found this via Moxie Grrrl

If you want to see what the Mainsteam Media Propagada Machine is saying about the shills in the media, in particular Jeff Gannon, go ahead and take a peek.

How does Gannon pass muster on the clearance to be so close to W? Perhaps they called his escort service and have used him in the past.

Trading Places with Terri Schiavo

A fair number of bloggers are very concerned about Terri Schiavo's fate. Lot's of them, the "Right to lifer" types, are hoping the Jeb and co step in again and keep her tubes in place.

I just have one proposition and one question for the those who suggest she need to be on life support for X number of years.

Proposition: How about trading places with her?

Question: If they make the decision to leave her on life support, and if Jesus let you, would you give her your life in exchange and take her place in the hospital bed (assuming all legal, medical, and health care expenses) until you die?

Let us know your answer and explain why in the comments.

slice:

Terri Schiavo suffered severe brain damage in 1990 when a chemical imbalance believed to have been brought on by an eating disorder caused her heart to stop beating and cut off oxygen to her brain.

While she breathes on her own, she relies on the feeding tube to survive. Doctors have ruled she is in a persistent vegetative state with no hope for recovery.

End slice:

What Hunter S. Thompson thought of Political Candidates

In light of the news of his recent suicide, lots of interesting tidbits are surfacing about Hunter S. Thompson and his writing.

There are some interesting elements to the following article in the Washington Post. More relevant are Thompson's thougths on 1972 presidential office candidates.

Slice:

Being around Edmund Muskie "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon "speaks for the werewolf in us." And Hubert Humphrey, the saint of long-ago liberalism: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while."

End slice:

No doubt, these descriptions will suffice for the next round of political elections.

How about Anne Rice for President in 08

We always knew that Anne Rice was one very smart cookie. She also is prescient in the whold gay/same sex marriage issue. I got these comments on a tip from Sister Talk:

Pop on over to Christopher Rice's (Anne's son - yes, the Gay one) location for the full details.

Slice:

CHRISTOPHER: That's further than most gay rights activists are willing to go - asking the church to accept it as sacrament, I mean.

ANNE: Superstition governs peoples attitudes towards gays, not religion. Gay people are knocking on the church doors asking to be married, and we, as Christians and Jews, should let them in. The Bible devotes very little attention to "gay people". The commandments against it are embedded with commandments that have been dismissed as outmoded on the basis of modern science and psychology. Religious institutions move very slowly but I believe it will happen in time. We must sustain our optimism and our polite demand. The idea that gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage is too absurd to counter. We have a straight family member who has been married so many times we call her present husband Charlie the Fifth.