Almost every morning I ride to work I’ve got the radio tuned to CNN and Fox News, switching betwene them when commercials come on. This morning, they both quickly reviewed certain political topics that they believe will influence the upcoming election. Among them, the recent New Jersey court ruling about gay marriage.
What was interesting to me was not the court ruling itself, in which the court said that homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. The court left to the legislature the responsiblility to decide how this recognition was to take place.
What did interest me is that this court outcome is perceived as a rallying cry for homophobic conservatives to head to the polls to quash any pro-gay-marriage candidates so that no gay marriage laws are formed. In essence, liberal courts have wrought doom on the election and gay marriage by half-sanctioning it.
This is what I was telling Brian before about Bush’s marriage act. Sure, maybe it leaves open loopholes for the states to define gay marriage, but in the end it draws attention to itself in the same way the abortion issue does.
You can easily stand on a street corner and protest the innocent killing of babies, which everyone abhors. But it’s much more difficult to appeal to the public for women’s rights to choose, which requires reasoning to understand, not simple visceral empathy for dead babies. In the end, the reactionaries end up voiding something positive that there aren’t radicals to defend.
But there’s plenty around in the news that doesn’t relate to dead babies.
Of course, you can hardly escape the Foley story in the news these days. Representative Foley was accused of having inapporpriate internet communications with some of the House pages.
Uh, who cares?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it’s right to send dirty messages to pre-teens on the computer. I just wonder how that at all affects his job. If he committed a crime, let him be arrested and arraigned. And if he’s guilty, then that’s a problem. But geez, can’t the government waste less time not governing?
This is another one of those political issues that makes for a “big election-bending story” when there aren’t other things in the world that are bothersome, like North Korea.
Maybe we should just build a wall around Congress to prevent this sort of thing. After all, that’s our big plan for Mexico.
This is one of the most absurd ideas I’ve heard in a very long time. It’s classic boondoggle - I imagine that when my grandkids are in school, they’ll learn about that President Bush #2 and how he approved the building of an American Great Wall of Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants. If this is how Congress shows that they’re serious about border security, then obviously they’re not taking this seriously.
I haven’t seen the design of this wall, but I can’t imagine that a wall is going to do a much better job of keeping out illegal immigrants than actually putting people on the border to look for them. Of course, I could be wrong.
As I am frequently told on the news, I don’t live there. There are apparently a few senators that live down there that think a wall is a great idea. Maybe they have an idea on how it’s going to be paid for, too, because apparently Bush’s Mexican Wall bill doesn’t yet have the federal government spending a dime on the multi-billion dollar project.
Meanwhile, Bush is going to stop saying the words “stay the course” in respect to his plans for Iraq.
I found this interesting. All during this war/occupation/whatever, we’ve been told that if we pull out of Iraq, then all of our work will have been for nothing. I buy that. So we’ve been told we need to “stay the course”. I guess that’s ok for a sound bite, but it’s not ok from a planning perspective.
My guess is that Americans have been getting tired of hearing those words and translating thing in their heads to, “We need to continue throwing our soldiers into battle against an enemy that keeps killing us, while we have no strategy for dealing with them other than sticking it out and shooting them until they aren’t there any more.” While I’m not enamoured with the Bush administration at all, I can’t believe his only command to his generals was, “Keep shootin’.”
Why on Earth it took his spin people this long to get rid of the “stay the course” message eludes me, but I hope he starts outlining a plan in the message that makes it through the media. Remember a plan is the set of actions you expect to take to reach a specific outcome. If the outcome is “Free Iraqi People”, I’ll buy that. But let’s hear some plans other than that we’re going to keep sending troops into the middle east until the Iraqis are at peace.
For those that espouse that a plan exists if only I would listen to Rumsfeld’s press briefings, then you’ve mistaken me for someone who has time to waste listening to press briefings. If the plan doesn’t boil down to something that an achor can report in place of “stay the course”, then you need to hire some new media handlers.
Speaking of the media, I see that Michael J. Fox is back on TV and getting a lot of press over a different baby-killing issue.
I think people fail to realize that most of modern medicine is a result of the work of people who had to beg permission for dissection of gallows victims for fear of their own persecution. Many of these findings were still regarded as heresy by the church and were often destroyed. This early work on anatomy would be the foundation upon which your Aspirin works.
I’m curious how opponents of stem cell research expect scientists to cure cancer. Explain to me how to do it thoroughly and without using the stem cells specified in these laws, and I’ll agree that we should avoid them. Because otherwise, we’re doing what “doctors” before medicine were doing: Guessing and hoping that God would intervene.
See also: leeches.
To cure cancer, if scientists need to steal stem cells from embryos that were never going to be babies anyway, then I say hand them over.
