Well, he hasn’t yet come right out and said that, but you gotta know that he’s close. First, he blames a “partisan” prosecutor (one who has previously prosecuted 12 Democrats and 3 Republicans). Now, DeLay is blaming an Austin newspaper for putting pressure on the prosecutor:
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is blaming an editorial in the Austin American-Statesman for pressuring a Texas prosecutor to pursue the criminal case against him.
“It was this renewed political pressure in the waning days of his hollow investigation that led this morning’s action,” DeLay said Wednesday after a grand jury indicted him on a criminal conspiracy charge.
Next up, Delay’s gonna blame the prosecutor’s mother. And if that doesn’t work, he might even blame his own mama.
I wonder what DeLay will say when he’s actually convicted?
Well, sorta. Bill Clinton is a gentleman, and his attacks always seem mild, more like constructive criticism than an attack. But make no mistake about it: Clinton was taking W. to the woodshed with his remarks to “This Week”:
Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq “virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction.”
The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism “and undermined the support that we might have had,” Clinton said in an interview with an ABC’s “This Week” programme.
More good news about marriage quality, this time from Daily Kos:
If those anti-gay efforts started with a bang, today they ended with a fizzle. A second constitutional convention addressing the issue today came up short. Really short. In fact, only 39 losers voted for it, 157 against.
Seems that after a year of gay marriage, people started realizing that heck — marriage really wasn’t in so much danger after all. Imagine that…
One state down, 49 more to go…
There’s only one surprise in the news that the Pledge of Allegiance has been ruled unconstitutional for the second time: that a case came to trial so quickly. From 9news.com: “Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was declared unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge ruling in the second attempt by an atheist to have the pledge removed from classrooms. The man lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
As long-time readers here already know, I am a strong believer that the Pledge is unconstitutional. I also believe that there’s an easy way to fix it: drop the “under God” part. As I’ve pointed out here before, the “under God” was not originally part of the Pledge. The phrase was added in the ’50s as a way to distinguish Americans from the atheistic Russians. Such concepts are antiquated in today’s world. There’s no reason for the “under God” to be kept. So just ditch it, and let the Pledge stand.
I am simply gonna steal this posting and Lyndon Johnson quote straight from The Rude Pundit:
Here’s Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 speech that laid this shit out: “There is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time-honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference…In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.”
That still holds true. Its 41 years later, but we’re still seeing the same exact problems. Things get better for a while whenever we have a
Democrat in the White House. Then a Republican comes in and screws it all up again. This is not rocket science, people! The more people that we can help get out of poverty, the stronger a nation we become!
Okay, as if there wasn’t enough proof that Tom Tancredo is a friggin’ wacko, we now have more. From 9news.com: Tom Tancredo wants to change design of 9/11 memorial:
Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., says the design, called “Crescent of Embrace,” could invite “controversy and criticism.” In a letter sent Tuesday to National Park Service Director Fran Mainella, Tancredo said many have questioned the shape “because of the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam — and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists.”
Okay, so crescents are out because the shape can be tied to Islam? The hell? Is Tancredo going to ask for clothes to be forbidden at the memorial, since the terrorists wore clothes on board the airplanes? Tancredo is out of his friggin’ mind!
The article is interesting enough, but the important information in Media Matters article about poverty rates is this bit: “the poverty rate declined every year Clinton was in office, from 15.1 percent when he took office in 1993 to a low of 11.3 percent in 2000; it has risen every year that Bush has been in office, from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.7 percent in 2004.”
So the next time that someone tells you that things are better under Bush than they were under Clinton, you can say, “Ah, but what about the poverty rate?” Of course, that’s assuming that a Bush supporter would care about the poor. Lord knows that W. himself doesn’t.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - The California Legislature on Tuesday became the first legislative body in the country to approve same-sex marriages, as gay-rights advocates overcame two earlier defeats in the Assembly.
Now let’s just hope that Schwarzenegger does the right thing and signs this sucker.
Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette says someone is going to have to take responsibility for the federal government’s “terrible lapse” regarding Hurricane Katrina.
DeGette’s best comment is also her most-quoted: “DeGette says she believes ‘there has to be heads rolling’ over the government’s response to Katrina — calling it ‘un-American, what our country did to neglect these folks.’”
DeGette was 100% correct in her comments. She has once again made me proud that she represents Colorado in Congress. I just wish that she represented my district. Instead, we are stuck with the racist Tom Tancredo, who voted against the Hurricane Katrina relief package because he believes that local governments are to blame for the horrid non-response. Could someone introduce Tancredo to the Real World, please?
There’s a major shake-up going on over at the FDA concerning Plan B, the so-called Morning-After pill:
The highly regarded women’s health chief at the Food and Drug Administration resigned Wednesday in protest of her agency’s refusal to allow over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception.
Assistant Commissioner Susan Wood charged that FDA’s leader overruled his own scientists’ determination that the morning-after pill could safely be sold without a prescription, and stunned his employees last week by instead postponing indefinitely a decision on whether to let that happen.
Basically, FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford unilaterally decided to not allow Plan B to be sold without a prescription. Even though the pill has been proven safe, and is currently being used by millions of women world-wide. Plan B can be purchased over-the-counter in most nations in Europe, and I believe in Canada, too. There’s no scientific reason not to sell Plan B OTC.
Which means that this is purely a political move. And my question is, just what the hell business does the FDA have not approving drugs for political reasons? That’s not its charter! That’s not its purpose. The FDA is supposed to make decisions based on scientific evidence, not based on politics!
God, this administration pisses me off. This is not the country that I remember! Where’d America go?
