JABbering Stooge

"That was fast. Struck by a divine revelation, were you?"
- Marcus to Lennier, Babylon 5, "Endgame"

Has the Catholic Church finally gone off the deep end? Was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger really the best they could do for a new pope? I’m serious. I don’t see how Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, will do anything other than harm the Catholic Church’s reputation in the world, unless one considers intolerance for dissenters a vital part of one’s reputation.
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Submitted for your perusal is a copy of my next editorial. I figured people might like to see the original, because the version that will appear in the student newspaper I write for will likely be cut in half, with important details omitted as the rest dies a slow, painful death due to hack drag-n-drop treatment of the word order.

For the life of me, I cannot understand what drives conservative pundits and their fans to so brazenly commit the rhetorical sin of hypocrisy in the service of their groupthink-driven narrative of how America is and how it should be. Nevertheless, the fact remains that such hypocrisy exists, and that it should be dealt with in the only way possible: exposing it to the light of day and hoping that you, the reader, are armed with the knowledge needed to survive the coming Uncivil War.
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Time magazine has perennial nutcase Ann Coulter on its cover. I’m sure they’ll be such staunch investigative journalists as to dig up those rather revealing quotes of her pontificating on Tim McVeigh (who ten years ago tomorrow blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City) or advocating violence against "liberals" (defined as anyone who disagrees with her in any way), right? (Yeah, that’ll happen when monkeys fly out of my butt.)
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The Austin American-Statesman reported on April 7 about how a bill by state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos (D-Austin) to name a stretch of the upcoming Texas 130 toll road after country western singer and Austin native Willie Nelson was being challenged by Republican state Sens. Jeff Wentworth and Steve Ogden.

(Sidebar: Wanna see my fellow Austinites spontaneously combust? Ask them about all the coming toll roads - particularly the quixotic effort to turn Capitol of Texas Highway/Loop 360 into a toll road.)

If nothing else, the one thing that has come out of Republican dominance in the last two decades is this double standard where you have to meet an impossible burden of proof to show that anything the Republicans do is wrong, corrupt or otherwise, while the standard for proving the same for Democrats is so low, even a mole could pass it.

These people have been busy naming everything that isn’t nailed down after their patron saint, Ronald Reagan, yet in order to get even a pathetic excuse of a library in Podunk, CA named after a prominent Democrat, you’d have to appeal to the Supreme Court (and good luck getting them to even look at the case). So how long will it be before I’m reporting to you from the corner of Ronald Reagan Ave. and Ronald Reagan Dr. in Reaganton, Gippersota? Only time will tell.

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Apr. 13, 2005 12:29 AM)

As a Texan, I have the misfortune of being represented in the U.S. Senate by one John "Union of Man and Box Turtle" Cornyn (R - Taliban). Well, Cornyn’s at it again. The former Texas Supreme Court Judge had the following to say about "activist judges" (translation: any judge who doesn’t rule in the rabid right’s favor):

And finally, I – I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news. And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in – engage in violence. Certainly without any justification but a concern that I have that I wanted to share.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), on the Senate floor, 4/4/05 (emphasis mine)