Hey, Texas Republicans, You Said That Out Loud!

 

The Texas Republican Party recently released its 2012 platform. As one might expect, it oscillates back and forth between crazy and stupid. There's a few dumb things you might expect, like

We also urge the Texas Legislature and the U.S. Congress to enact legislation prohibiting any judicial jurisdiction from allowing any substitute or parallel system of Law, specifically foreign Law (including Sharia Law)

You know, just because legislation is spectacularly unneccessary is no reason NOT to pass it!

and

Unelected, Appointed Bureaucrats (Czars) - We decry the appointment of unelected bureaucrats, and we urge Congress to use their constitutional authority to defund and abolish these positions and return authority to duly elected officials, accountable to the electorate.

Sure, let's vote for every fucking bureaucrat. I want the assistant to the under-secretary of agriculture to be directly accountable to me, the voter.  I can't have the President just going around appointing middle-managers to oversee the study of interstate traffic patterns without the voters weighing in.

There's the wholly pointless stuff, like

Electoral College - We strongly support the Electoral College.

Really, that's the entire bullet point. "we strongly support the Electoral College." Maybe they had to meet some minimum number of words or something?

And there's the crazy stuff like

Emergency War Powers and Martial Law Declarations - We strongly urge Congress to repeal the War Powers Act and end our declared state of emergency. Any Declaration of Martial law should be approved by Congress.

Because the president could be declaring martial law any minute without that Congressional check.
Also, wouldn't it be better to say "No Martial Law?" Why say no martial law unless. . . ?

and

Transportation Corridors – We oppose the construction of transportation projects which surrender control or ownership to foreign interest. We oppose the use of eminent domain for construction of a “trans-Texas corridor” or similar project which would create a federal corridor through Texas.

Yeah! I am so sick of the feds building roads and then giving them to the Belgians!
Also, um, you do know Interstate 10 already runs through Texas, right? I-10 is a federal road. A federal road through Texas. So you've kind of already lost this battle. Sorry.

And the assholish stuff like

Natural resources and conservation easements; groundwater and/or mineral rights are a vested ownership. Conservation easements, involving watersheds, green areas and nationalization of lands should be resisted in the strongest manner applicable.

'Cuz don't tell me I can't dump my leftover meth chemicals in the drinking water!

 

 There's even some stuff that makes sense, like

Judicial Nominees - We urge Republican Senate leadership to ensure that a record vote is taken on every judicial nominee.

Wow! When even the Texas Republican Party is fed up with your constant filibustering, maybe it's time to knock it off!

But there are a couple of planks in this platform that are truly shocking, even by Texas Republican Standards. First, there's this:

Voter Rights Act – We urge that the Voter Rights Act of 1965 codified and updated in 1973 be repealed and not reauthorized.

Wow! Um, guys, you're supposed to pretend that you don't intend to engage in voter suppression.

Oh, but that's nothing compared to this:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Holy schneikies!

 Isn't challenging the student's fixed beliefs the whole point of education?
Oh, no we can't have that.
Let's say a student has a fixed belief that an old man who lives at the North Pole brings all the children of the world toys once a year. Sure would hate to have him ever challenge that belief!
Or let's say a kid has a fixed belief that the sun rises every morning out of the Gulf of Mexico, flies across the sky every day, then sets down in the Sea of Cortez each evening, because that's sure what it looks like. Can't have that belief challenged!

I know Republicans don't really like people to use critical thinking skills, but holy shit! You're not supposed to say that out loud!

Scalia is a Hack

 

Antonin Scalia isn't even making an effort to disguise his partisan hackery.
In his dissent on the SB1070 "papers, please" decision, he not only takes gratuitous swipes at Barack Obama's immigration policy, he says ridiculous things like this:

"If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state." 

Yes, we should. Except no one does. No one refers to Arizona as a sovereign state, because Arizona is not a sovereign state. Arizona, like every other state, is subject to the laws of the US Federal government. That's why, even though California has legalized medicinal marijuana, anyone who uses medical pot is still running the risk of arrest by the D.E.A. Because Federal Law supercedes State law. It's Article VI, Clause II, the "Supremacy Clause."





And this:

"Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants. . .
What I do fear—and what Arizona and the States that support it fear—is that ‘federal policies’ of nonenforcement will leave the States helpless before those evil effects of illegal immigration. . "

Because, as any law professor will tell you, the first step to determining the constitutionality of a law is to consider how people feel about it.


And this:

There is no doubt that “before the adoption of the constitution of the United States” each State had the authority to “prevent [itself] from being burdened by an influx of persons.”

Great. Before the adoption of the Constitution. How is that relevant to our reality in which the Constitution has been adopted?

 

And this:

The Articles of Confederation had provided that “the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States.” Articles of Confederation, Art. IV.

The Articles of Confederation? You mean the document that was scrapped and replaced by the Constitution? That Articles of Confederation? Does Scalia really think that they have any relevance?

And this:

Two other provisions of the Constitution are an acknowledgment of the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders. Article I provides that “[n]o State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws.” Art. I, §10, cl. 2. This assumed what everyone assumed: that the States could exclude from their territory dangerous or unwholesome goods.

Hey, at least he's referring to the actual Constitution this time. Of course, the part he quotes deals with imports and exports, not people, and severely limits the states' ability to restrict those. But still. . . it's something? I guess?




And this:

Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws?
A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding?

Yes, speculation about what might have happened 200 years ago under different hypothetical circumstances is probably the best way to answer thorny legal questions!

And the capper:

. . . in the first 100 years of the Republic, theStates enacted numerous laws restricting the immigra- tion of certain classes of aliens, including convicted criminals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks.

Yeah, states used to be allowed to keep the blacks out, so why not the browns? Seriously? This is your precedent? You know states were also allowed to have slavery during the first 100 years of the Republic. Should we bring that back, too? No, don't answer that.

Kings and Queens

Recently, dimwitted senator Scott Brown (R-MA, how weird is it to type that?) had this to say about his busy busy days:

"Each and every day that I've been a United States senator, I've been discussing issues, meeting on issues, in secret meetings and with kings and queens and prime ministers and business leaders and military leaders, talking, voting, working on issues every single day," he said on the Jim Braude and Margery Eagan Show.  

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/scott-brown-fast-furious-9925053#ixzz1ywv3i5pM

Secret meetings with kings and queens? Really?

I'm quite sure Queen Elizabeth is not interrupting her Jubilee to schlep across the pond to hold a secret meeting with a first-term backbencher who might possibly throw her majesty's tea into Boston Harbor, and I have to figure that Queens Noor and Latifah both have better things to do with their time, so who are these kings and queens (and possibly Czarinas?) with whom Brown is secretly meeting? One can only speculate. . .

 

maybe the Burger King?

 

Or the Queen Mary?

 

King Cobra would make sense.

 

Or the King of Cartoons?

I suppose Brown might be hunky enough to lure 

Priscilla Queen of the Desert into a private meeting.

Or the ghost of Freddy Mercury

 

But no. Brown's spokesman cleared up the mystery:

Brown spokesman Colin Reed said in an e-mail that "Senator Brown was speaking generally about private meetings he has had with foreign and domestic leaders." He later acknowledged that Brown, who has made his reputation as a truck-driving everyman, has not met with any royalty. "He misspoke when he said kings and queens," Reed said.

He misspoke. He said "kings and queens" when he meant to say "wings and beans" which is what he has each and every day for lunch?

With a side of Lime Sinister?

(cuz he also said prime ministers)

Still, we're supposed to believe that this doofus:



is meeting each and every day with world leaders of some sort?  I would think this putz would have trouble getting a meeting with Mitch McConnell.

Rebutting Bill Gates

So this has been making the rounds lately. And there's a pretty good chance that Bill Gates never wrote this, because this sort of thing usually turns out to be fake, but judging by the number of people forwarding this in e-mails or posting it on the Facebook or whatever, there are a lot of folks who think that these are words to live by. So let's take a look at the 11 Things.


Rule # 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it.
Sure, why should we try to make life more fair, says the guy with 20 zillion dollars.

Rule # 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Why do these people hate self-esteem so much? I used to occasionally catch bits & pieces of Dr. Laura on the radio, and she was always railing about self-esteem and  how upset she was that people tried to help kids have it. I'm fairly sure that a person who feels good about himself is more likely to accomplish something, anyway. As someone who grew up with very low self-esteem, I can tell you it's no way to live. So fuck you, anyone who would deny a child the right to feel good about him/herself.

Rule # 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.
Yeah, no one thinks that. No one thinks they're going to earn decent money right out of high school, let alone be a vice president. And certainly no one thinks that they are going to travel back in time to the point where having a "car phone" was some sort of status symbol.

 

Rule # 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Let's hold off for a minute on this one. Wait 'till we get to #8.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

That may be true, seeing as how my grandparent were German immigrants and may not have understood what the word "opportunity" means, but those of us fluent in English know the difference between "opportunity" and "dead-end job that pays a minimum wage which is nowhere near enough to support yourself."

 

Rule # 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault; so don't whine about your mistakes,

learn from them.

I'm not whining about my mistakes, I'm blaming my parents, so I'm not really acknowledging that I have in fact made a mistake.

Rule # 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

 So, because my parents used to be cool, fuck the rainforest? I don't really see the logic here.  Because my parents paid my bills, it doesn't matter that the rainforests are being destroyed? My parents did a lot for me so there are no rainforest-destroying parasites in their generation? Seriously, I don't see what the point is supposed to be.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Wait. you said in rule # 4 that my teachers are tough. Now you're saying that that they're not failing anyone and giving you multiple chances to get the right answer? I don't think that that's even true. I know a couple of teachers, I'm going to e-mail them and find out if they've ever heard of any schools where failing grades have been eliminated. Here's what I do know, though. In the company where I work (a large Fortune-500 company) we have training videos for every aspect of the job, including government-mandated safety training, on line. If, at the end of the  class, you get an answer wrong, the program will replay the part of the video that covered that material and give you a similar question to answer. If you get it wrong again, the process repeats as many times as necessary until you get the questions all correct and the program says "congratulations! You scored 100%!" This is in "real life," not some fictional school. So the fictional school where no one fails and you get to take the test over and over bears a hell of a strong resemblance to my real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you "FIND YOURSELF". Do that on your own time.

Really? You don't get summers off? Really? You really think kids don't know that? You really think that they don't see their parents working during the summer and put 2 & 2 together?  

And really, who "finds themselves" anymore? Who does that? I'm really starting to think that this was written in the mid 70's. Really.

Rule 10: Television and video games are NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Why would you think that anyone would not realize this? You would have to have pretty serious mental problems to think that real life looked anything like this

or this




Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Sure, why be a decent person unless there's going to be some payoff in the end.
Also, very few "nerds" end up being Bill Gates. Chances are, the guy you'll end up working for was the star of his high-school football team, or class president. He's not overly bright, but he's got a certain charisma and a a shit-ton of self-confidence from having been the big man on campus. The guys playing Dungeons and Dragons in their spare time will probably end up being smart-ass bloggers. Hey, wait!

Oh, My God! Geraldo Was Right!

Wearing a hoodie IS dangerous!





Something about wearing a hoodie will make an unintelligent animal want to kill you!