Kentucky Democrats are proud tonight of our freshman Congressman John Yarmuth KY3 (Louisville) who wore and distributed buttons among willing colleagues saying simply 'Article 1'. This was to express the Constitutional fact that Congress is the boss, not a 'unitary' exective. Yarmuth was immediately slapped down by the 'official parlimentarian' John Sullivan R-OK1, saying that the pins violate House Rules prohibiting the 'wearing of badges by members to communicate a message'. Yarmuth responded with a letter of multiple questions, foremost a demand to define the difference between wearing a symbol of the First Article of the Constitution and wearing a flag pin.
Compromise was reached at a prohibition whenever a Congressman is speaking, (who'da guessed that CSPAN cameras are so feared?). Anyhow, I hope that Rep Yarmuth and his pin-wearing colleagues will make a conspicuous ritual of removing their pins each time they speak and replacing them when yielding the floor.
Imagine all the people at a huge Anti-WAR rally singing the sweet Peace and Patriotic songs we all know, in perfect unison and on key. Songs like 'Give Peace a Chance', 'We Shall Overcome', 'Imagine', 'Yesterday', 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'This Land Is My Land', Brother Can You Spare A Dime', 'God Bless America' and 'America The Beautiful'. Did I miss any? You can think of others that bring tears, especially in these tragic times and especially if well-sung by a chorus of thousands. Please give me titles or links.
I'm sure you're thinking, 'How are you going to keep it from sounding like your typical 'Happy Birthday' at Farrells Ice Cream Parlor or even worse, the drunken concert and soccer game sing-alongs?...Out-of-sync and way off-key?
I just wrote a note to my Congressman Chandler and Senators McConnel & Bunning. I want them to overturn Bush's cruel veto of the children's health insurance program, SCHIP:
My note:
"C'mon now. Even if you believe in your dog-eat-dog world, where absolutely every product and service is a market commodity, you must admit that all governments have a high-yield long-term interest in the raising of healthy citizens. Please don't play your power politics at the expense of American childrens' health. Otherwise we'll know you're just Dead-Beat-Dads, off on your own adventures."
You can write your own reps a message too. This website makes it easy.
Newsflash!...Since last night's news reports from stations in the far-east saying that emergency phone centers were being overwhelmed with missing persons alerts, the phenomenon has swept wesward overnight, evidently following the rising sun. England, by then already anticipating, was struck soon after midnight EST and Africa, according to widespread though rudimentary cell-phone emergency services, has also experienced the advancing phenomenon.
All this annual gift exchange is just silly and wasteful. How many of your last year's gifts was something you liked in itself or even remember? And the pleasure of buying such painfully ill-suited gifts for others? Right up there with doing your taxes. Don't get me wrong; I love the festivity of Christmas, it's just all the crappy gifts. For kids and couples who are still-in-love, it's another thing. Shower kids and your lover with as many gifts as their character can withstand.
Back to adults: How does one break the imaginary chain?
Here's how we did it in my extended family:
Abraham Lincoln challenged the South's seccession based upon his solemn inaugural oath to defend the Constitution, and the bloodletting of the Civil War cemented the primacy of the Constitution above all other ideologies. Yet many Southerners, conservatives and religious fundamentalists refuse to regard the Constitution as sacrosanct, a heresy that liberals disbelieve at their peril. The Constitution has internal enemies! Conservatives regard the ACLU as anti-American-and-worse 'though its credo and acts are solely to defend the Bill of Rights no matter if you are Madelyn Murray O'Hare or Rush Limbaugh. More....
These people are fucking dangerous! First they appropriate from the Pagans that bribing, impish deity, Kris Kringle, as a children's indoctrinating surrogate for God. Then they fall for the capitalist lie that the ability to prosper and to buy is a sign of God's blessing. And now on late November's Black Friday, 7:00AM door-busters trample the faces of the less agile to buy the sure-to-be-sold-out X-box 360 whose most popular games among their spoiled and unatheletic spawn are 'Grand Theft Auto' and 'Mortal Combat'. More anger below the fold....
We talk a lot online about what we (but mostly others) should do to win back congress in 2006 but these ideas quickly scroll off the page and into oblivion. Except for the rare political god, elections are won by the organization of intense 'though grubby on-the-ground doorknocking, phonebanking and such. The principal flaw in this approach is that local registered voterfile data is based upon voter's original registration. Consequently, phone#s & addresses are deplorably out-of-date. You can ammend this deficiency from the comfort of the chair in which you now sit......
'The Theory of Intelligent Design' is not a theory since it posits no verifiable hypotheses; it is rather a partisan attack upon natural history by embittered religious creationists who have exhausted all judicial appeals to teach biblical inerrancy to our most vulnerable subjects in public schools and whose logic is based solely upon argument from personal incredulity. Unlike the 'hard sciences' such as physics and chemistry which seek universal principles through exhaustively cross-checked experimental interrogations of nature, natural history is more like forensics: the investigation of events which cannot be repeated, and is therefore more vulnerable to criticism from both within and without that truly demanding and venerable discipline. I shall deal here with the very origin of life, which will hopefully illuminate not only the moment of 'creation' but also the evolution of unique species during the aeons to follow. Below the fold.....Onward!
For 2.5 years now I've been coming first to dKos for my daily dose of anger; then to Eschaton, then Billmon, Smirking Chimp, Hullabaloo, Information Clearinghouse, etc., etc. As with the interminable meetings of our local Council for Peace & Justice, I came to realize that it's all one big circle-jerk; nothing really accomplished other than mutual masturbation. So, I returned to the Fayette County Democratic Women's Network for whom I had walked to register Democrats last year. Their new project is to walk all precincts before 2006 to update the county registered voter list which, like all voter lists, is deplorably out-of-date.
Republicans still deeply abhor the 1960s because they were in much the same position we Democrats find ourselves today. Democrats owned the Administration and Congress; the courts and media were relatively liberal; the population was sympathetic to civil rights and progress; and we even had a misbegotten insergent WAR. And we had a popularly nasty term for the right-wing, comparable to their assiduously now-corrupted term 'liberal'; and that nasty term was 'radical conservative'. We had other terms of 'endearment' like 'McCarthyite' and 'John Bircher', terms as equally poisonous as 'Communist' and 'Red' as applied to liberals but those homegrown examples of repression were less hyperbolic and therefore more believable.
But the term'radical conservative' won't suffice today since Republicans have co-opted both 'liberal' and 'radical' to apply exclusively to the left. We need a brand name for Republicans and I think that name is...
Constitutional crisis in Kentucky: The Kentucky Senate (22R, 15D, 1 vacant) has voted to seat Republican Dana Seum (sime) Stephenson instead of Democrat Virginia Woodward who had been ruled by the court to be the only legitimate candidate for the 37th district (west Louisville). On Nov 1, candidate Woodward had filed a motion saying that opponent Stephenson had resided in Kentucky for only two of the six years required for candidacy by the Ky Constitution. At the hearing, Stephenson admitted that she had lived in her Indiana house, paid resident tuition, obtained a driver's license and voted in Indiana and had been expunged from Ky voter rolls, but had owned a house with her mother in, and had always intended to return to, Ky. Unofficially, Stephenson had received a 1000 vote plurality but the judge upheld the Constitution, ordering the election board to not count the votes cast for Stephenson, thus making Woodward the de facto winner.
