Biffster’s World

Wow… it is scary that this type of thing is happening in Colorado in the year 2005:

Deborah Davis, 50, of Arvada, Colo., told the Rocky Mountain News that the bus she took to work passed through the Federal Center, and that federal officers would routinely board it asking for identification. She said the officers with the Federal Protective Service just looked at the IDs and did not record them or compare them with any lists.

After reviewing her rights, one day in September she refused to produce her ID and she refused their orders to get off the bus. She said she was removed from the bus, handcuffed and ticketed for two petty offenses.

Well, here’s some good news:

A former Green Party member who advocates an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq says he will challenge incumbent
Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2006 Democratic nomination for Senate.

“She’s in favor of the war and in favor of continuing the occupation,” Steven Greenfield, a professional saxophone player, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his New Paltz home.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: No More Bushes, and No More Clintons. We need to break the presidency out of this incestuous in-breeding that’s been going on since 1980. We need to make sure that the Executive branch contains no Bushes and no Clintons in 2008. Anything that can help this is a Good Thing.

But anything that can help achieve this goal and increase the status of the Green party is an Even Better Thing!

Looks like the Oak Ridge (TN) High School superintendent isn’t so keen on the whole Free Speech idea:

Administrators at Oak Ridge High School went into teachers’ classrooms, desks and mailboxes to retrieve all 1,800 copies of the newspaper Tuesday, said teacher Wanda Grooms, who advises the staff, and Brittany Thomas, the student editor.

The Oak Leaf’s birth control article listed success rates for different methods and said contraceptives were available from doctors and the local health department. Superintendent Tom Bailey said the article needed to be edited so it would be acceptable for the entire school.

This is scary, truly scary. Shouldn’t our public schools be teaching children about the Rights its citizens are granted which makes this such a great nation, instead of demonstrating what happens when those rights are trampled on?

Conventional wisdom going into this year’s elections said that a large turnout would lead to C & D passing. Well, there was a record-large turnout at the polls this year! “Nearly half of the state’s registered voters cast ballots in this month’s election, setting a new record for an odd-year election. The official turnout for the Nov. 1 election was 49.85 percent, breaking the record of 47.25 percent set in 2003, Secretary of State Gigi Dennis said Monday.”

Of course, only C passed, so conventional wisdom was only partially correct. Still, it’s good to see so many Coloradoans get out to the polls.

This is bizarre…. apparently, someone is suing the University of California-Berkeley, saying that their Understanding Evolution website is advocating religious beliefs.

In the lawsuit filed last month, the Caldwells contend the site is an effort “to modify the beliefs of public school science students so they will be more willing to accept evolutionary theory as true.”

The plaintiffs are not proponents of “intelligent design” — a theory that living organisms are so complex they must have been created by a higher intelligence — but they object to the teaching of evolution as scientific fact, Jeanne Caldwell said.

How in the hell does evolution qualify as a religion? It’s science, pure and simple, and does not consider any religious beliefs. This lawsuit should be tossed out in less time than it took me to write this brief entry!

I found a couple of articles at SoapBlox Colorado regarding more fun with Tom Tancredo. If you are a member of the Republican party, don’t you really want to reign this guy in? He’s so extreme, so blatantly bigoted, so plainly insane that he can’t help but hurt your party..

Anyway, the first article is about the war of words between Denver Mayor Hickenlooper and Tancredo regarding Immigration. Basically, Tancredo sent a letter to Hickenlooper saying he believes Denver is a safe haven for illegal immigrants. Hickenlooper fires back that, if Tancredo wants to help funnel federal money into the state, then authorities will have more money to try and stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the city.

The story alludes to the growing rumblings inside the Republican party, as they try to strattle the line of wooing Latino voters while flying the anti-immigration flag. Tancredo never helps their cause, continually being a thorn in the side and refusing to toe the party line.

Gotta give Tancredo some props. He has the amazing ability to enrage both Democrats and Republicans.

As entertaining as that is, the next story is even worse. Apparently, Tancredo just can’t overcome his intolerance, this time while working with an interfaith group to try to come up with a “joint statement about religion, terrorism and retaliation (via DenverPost.com). Tancredo actually ended up causing more harm than good. From the same article:

“To me, the problem is not where the statement broke down,” said Joyce Rubin of the Denver office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), part of the interfaith group.

“The problem is that Congressman Tancredo continues to characterize and blame a whole religion and a whole group of people based on the actions of a few extremists and hasn’t apologized for it,” Rubin said.

I hope that the ADL isn’t holding their collective breath waiting for an apology from Tancredo. If there’s one thing that Tancredo has been consistent about, it’s his assuredness that he is right, and everyone else is wrong. He’s not just a racist, he’s a self-righteous racist. He is not going to change his views or beliefs for anyone. And he’s definitely not going to apologize for what he believes is right.

As if there aren’t enough reasons to join the ACLU, here’s another:ACLU files suit over 2 ousted from Bush event

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday sued two volunteers who helped with a March appearance by President Bush, saying they removed two people from the event because of their political views.

Wow! Someone really doesn’t like George W. Bush and his cronies, and has voiced their displeasure in video and song. Well, they took Jim’s Big Ego’s song “Asshole” and put it to very good use. A must see; just forgive the crudity of the profanity.

Well, maybe “moron” isn’t correct. Maybe she’s intelligent enough to know how to get people to believe things that are patently false. She could just be evil, I suppose. A liar and party hack who has no integrity, and is willing to pass on party lies to sway public opinion.

The latest example of this is one of her latest columns, via yahoo.com. Coulter gets off to a bad start, with not one but two lies right out of the gates:

As we now know, Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaida and was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea and enriched uranium from Niger.

We actually know the exact opposite of this: we now know that Saddam was not working with al-Quaeda, and that Saddam was not trying to get enriched uranium from Niger. That Coulter tries to pass off these lies as fact is both pathetic and scary, because there are people who will believe what she writes.

But then Coulter goes on to fictionalize the vote that took place in the House of Representatives regarding a resolution to immediately withdraw troops from Iraq:

Fed up with being endlessly told “the American people” have turned against the war in Iraq, Republicans asked the Democrats to show what they had in their hand and vote on a resolution to withdraw the troops.

By a vote of 403-3, the House of Representatives wasn’t willing to bet that “the American people” want to pull out of Iraq. (This vote also marked the first time in recent history that the Democrats did not respond to getting their butts kicked by demanding a recount.)

You’ll notice that Coulter leaves out the “immediately” part of the resolution. Which is unfair, because that is the crux of the resolution and the resulting vote. There is no way that we could immediately leave Iraq. We have to do a phased withdrawal of troops. So there was no way that Congresspeople - Democrat or Republican - were going to vote in favor of this. (I’m actually surprised the vote wasn’t unanimous.) This was a sham of a resolution, called specifically to try to embarrass House Democrats.

Coulter wasn’t finished there, however. She then goes on to try to declare anti-war protests unAmerican and treasonous:

Anti-war protests in the U.S. during the Vietnam War were a major source of moral support to the enemy. We know that not only from plain common sense, but from the statements of former North Vietnamese military leaders who evidently didn’t get the memo telling them not to say so. In an Aug. 3, 1995, interview in The Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, called the American peace movement “essential” to the North Vietnamese victory.

“Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement,” he said. “Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.”

Coulter seems to ignore the fact completely that the anti-war movement is what led to the end of the Vietnam war, saving untold thousands of lives. And I don’t buy her argument, nor her “source” for a minute. The enemy was fighting because foreigners hard invaded their home lands. They were not going to give up for any reason short of our withdrawal. And the same thing is true of the Iraqi insurgents.

Coulter finishes up her article with a rather boring tactic that’s been used for far too long by conservatives: calling anyone who would dare to exercise their right to free speech “traitors.”

They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.

Well, I guess that, if you can’t match up intellectually or truthfully with someone, calling them names is the next best thing to do?

Anyway, that leaves us with one very important question: why did I bother to rebut an Ann Coulter column? What can I say? I’m stuck at work and I am very bored. It was either do this, or take the trash out.

Could it really be true that the original name for Operation Iraqi Freedom was Operation Iraqi Liberation, or OIL? Well…. I’m not quite cynical enough to believe this administration is stupid enough to name the operation for the reason we are there (oil), but I do believe this administration is that arrogant.

And apparently, it might be so. Because there are links off both the White House’s website as well as Senator Jim Bunning’s website. And many, many others. You can run the Google search yourself if you want to see more results.

Unbelievable!