News and Politics

Is Bush losing it?

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This is very scary:

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.

“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”

Open letter to the Log Cabin Republicans and the Libertarian Party

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Since it’s now clear that the Republican Party has been completely taken over by the religious right and wants nothing to do with the LCR, it’s time to break away.

The Republican party isn’t the only conservative party. There’s also the Libertarian Party. The LP is truly dedicated to the core principles of smaller government and personal freedom the LCR praises the Republican Party for.

I don’t think it’s possible to take back the Republican Party any more, as the LCR is attempting. Instead the Republican Party should just be left to the religious right while those alienated by their religious dogma create a new mainstream conservative movement. This is a perfect opportunity for the Libertarian Party to go mainstream. By sticking with true conservative values, the Libertarian Party can become the influential conservative party while the religious right does their own thing and eventually loses influence.

Married in Massachusetts

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Mazel Tov to Marcia Hams and Susan Shepherd, together for 27 years, the first same sex couple as well as all of the others married in Massachusetts under the new law. Visit the wedding album at HRC to see the happy couples.

This is a very hopeful sign, and maybe it will spread to other states. I didn’t see any natural disasters or heterosexual marriages being destroyed as a result despite protesters from Rev. Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church who make a career of protesting such events.

Don’t forget to sign the petition against the Federal anti-marriage amendment.

Howard Stern yanked off six Clear Channel radio stations

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Via Metafilter:

Howard Stern yanked off six Clear Channel radio stations The kingdom of the self proclaimed king of all media has been trimmed after Clear Channel dropped the Stern show on Tuesday after he allegedly aired sexually obscene and racist material.

The offensive exchange reportedly occured when a caller asked ex-Paris Hilton boyfriend (and sex-tape co-star) Rick Salomon if he had ever had oral sex on a black woman. The caller used the N-word to describe the black woman. Then the caller asked Salomon if it tasted like watermellon.

Is this grounds to fire the talk show host, or is it more politically motivated and the beginning of the end of free speech… of highly rated powerful talk show hosts who blast the FCC and aren’t Republican.

entire stern show here. (BitTorrent rq’d)

I personally don’t care for Howard Stern, but I’m outraged by Clear Channel’s actions. We have a media monopoly dictating taste and telling us what we should be listening to. It’s time to break up Clear Channel and bring back local ownership of radio stations.

Being A Kid – It's Now A Crime

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Plastic::Politics::School: Due to a variety of factors, more and more minor infractions are resulting in young children and adolescents being arrested and dumped into the juvenile justice system. [Plastic]

Zero Tolerance equals Zero Brains

Once upon a time, if a child was disruptive in class, he or she would be sent to the principal, who would generally, with the help of the parents, mete out the appropriate punishment. End of case. But due to a variety of factors, more and more minor infractions are resulting in young children and adolescents being arrested and dumped into the juvenile justice system: ‘The idea that you try to find out why somebody did something or give a person a second chance or try to solve a problem in a way that’s not punitive — that’s become almost quaint now,’ states Dr. Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University and the director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.

When a 14-year-old girl in Toledo, Ohio, wore a low-cut top in violation of her school’s dress code and refused to cover up, she was handcuffed by city police assigned to the school, booked on a misdemeanor charge, and detained for several hours. She is just one of an increasing number of local cases in which students have been arrested for minor offenses, such as being unruly in class, swearing at school officials, or shouting at classmates. Two middle school boys were arrested for turning off lights in the girls’ bathroom; an 11-year-old girl was arrested for ‘hiding out in the school and not going to class,’ according to the police report. Fred Whitman, the court’s intake officer, contends that only a handful of all the cases involve serious incidents. Juvenile court judges in other states also fear that their venue will be overrun by cases that should be handled by schools. A study by Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group, found that there were three times as many juvenile arrests in 2001 in public schools in Miami-Dade County, Florida, than in 1999, sixty percent of which were for ‘simple assaults’ and ‘miscellaneous’ charges.