A federal judge has overturned an outrageous federal law that prevented DC residents from circulating petitions to legalize drugs in the district. I admired Bob Barr during the corruption battles of the nineties, but he is behaving despicably with regard to the Constitution in his insane War on (Some) Drugs.
Why just imagine what might happen if drugs were legalized in the District of Columbia. Thousands of people might use drugs. Why, even the mayor might start usi…
Oh. Never mind.
I haven’t been beating on this drum much, but Instantman and others have been all over it. And fellow-blogger Dale Amon sends me the URL to the site that is fighting the incipient government takeover of our personal computers and DVDs.
Go thee out and sign the petition.
Now we have Krugman doing it.
The group’s efforts managed to turn Whitewater ? a $200,000 money- losing investment ? into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.
“never did find any evidence…”
It continually amazes me how these flying Clinton spinmonkeys are so blithe about their willful mendacity on the editorial pages. Now that lie will be sitting there in the archives of the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record in perpetuity. But they’re shameless.
No, Paul. Now you’re calling Mr. Ray a liar. He said himself on the teevee the other night that he had enough evidence to prosecute. He just chose not to. Prosecutor’s discretion, you know…
I think that it’s your pants catching on fire here…
Instantman points out a particularly odious and mindless piece by Eric Alterman (but you have to forgive him–after all, as Mark Twain once said about someone else of similar cerebral propensity, “I’d brain him, if he had the material for it”) about the unfair balance between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian pundits.
He writes this as though it’s some kind of Olympic ice-skating contest. As though we all know that there are no objective measures of morality, both sides should be assumed to be of equal weight on the ethics scale (and we certainly can’t expect the judges themselves to be objective), so we have to at least make sure that we minimize the stacking of the deck so that both sides have equal punditry numbers and quality of spinning and support.
Well, Eric, I’ll surprise you here. While roughly half of my ancestors are of Jewish descent (if I’m to believe the tales told to me in my childhood), I think that Israel sucks in multiple ways. It is a socialist nation. It can sustain such socialism only through the largess of American foreign aid and implicit defense. It is a religious state, that imposes unacceptable (to me) strictures on freedom. It continues to subsidize collectives called kibbutzim (though not as much as in years past) in a vain effort to sustain the socialist vision that led to its founding. It is a fractious country, unable to maintain a coherent policy because it is ruled by a multi-party parliamentarian system, derived from failed European models.
Oh, sorry. I know that someone like you considers all of this a compliment–not criticism, so what’s a guy to do, Eric? When one can’t even criticize the state of Israel without sounding like a defender of it to socialist journalists, is it surprising that your little enemies list is so skewed?
But the reality (yes, I know, a vile and unfamiliar concept to writers for The Nation) intrudes. I have to conclude that, for all its flaws, it’s the only nation in that region of the world that has any hope of providing a glimmer of freedom and prosperity to its people, including its Arab citizens.
Israel occasionally kills some civilians accidentally in the process of hunting down cold-blooded murderers. Some Israelis even occasionally kill Palestinians deliberately, but when this occurs, they are brought to trial, and at least a semblance of justice.
Their enemies, on the other hand, vow that all Israelis must die. This is not just the rantings of a few hotheads, but the official policy of their governments (though it’s usually spoken and written only in Arabic, for local consumption). They deliberately target civilians, including women, children, and even babes, in their maniacal hatred of Jews. They suck at the teat of the long-vanquished Nazis, and mourn their passing, and lust to finish the job that they once started. They deny a voice to their own people, filling them instead with an irrational hatred of all things not them, and thus deflect their peoples’ righteous anger from their own failings and despotry.
In light of this, what’s surprising, and dismaying, is not the imbalance of pundits in favor of Israel, but the fact that there are any on the other side.
I was watching Jerry Rivers kvetch about being accused of being of Jewish extraction by a terrorist from Hamas on Fox just now.
He was whining (in apparent surprise) that “this Hamas guy was a racist SOB!”
He was shocked…shocked!
I was watching Jerry Rivers kvetch about being accused of being of Jewish extraction by a terrorist from Hamas on Fox just now.
He was whining (in apparent surprise) that “this Hamas guy was a racist SOB!”
He was shocked…shocked!
I was watching Jerry Rivers kvetch about being accused of being of Jewish extraction by a terrorist from Hamas on Fox just now.
He was whining (in apparent surprise) that “this Hamas guy was a racist SOB!”
He was shocked…shocked!
Paul Orwin has been bugging me for evidence that asteroid impacts have actually had an effect on humanity in the past (the post in which this occurred is actually the lead for my Fox News column today). I replied that it was certainly conceivable that the biblical flood and other mythical catastrophes could have been the result of such an event.
Someone via email pointed me to this article at Space.com from November that says exactly that.
As a public service announcement, and not to pick on the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan, but I just happened to notice it here as the latest inadvertent offender. Strict HTML requires that tags like <i> be opened and closed on each paragraph. If you don’t, HTML-compliant browsers like Opera will display only the paragraph that has the tag in it as that font–the rest of the grafs will revert to standard text, even though the tag wasn’t closed on the first graf.
This problem doesn’t show up in Explorer, because it’s either more forgiving, if you want to consider it a Microsoft feature, or non-HTML compliant, if you want to consider it a bug.
Anyway, as an Opera user, I often find it hard to tell excerpted text from the blogger’s because the italics or whatever disappear after the first paragraph. Please fix this, if possible. I’ll give Mr. Slotman a break, because I can understand the the tag supply may be limited in an insolvent republic…
Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging, and be careful out there…
After some discussion, I’ve decided to put it back up, for now, but I’ve reduced the checking frequency from twice a minute to once, and I’m only getting headers rather than the entire blogspot page. I’m going to close up the source again also, because it really could become a problem if lots of bloggers start doing the same thing.
I think that if this really shows up as significant traffic at Pyra, they’ll figure out which IP to block. But as Steven Den Beste says, they have hundreds of thousands of sites, and get millions of hits per hour. I suspect that right now it’s just spitting in a hurricane in terms of bandwidth.