Jeff Flake’s Indecision Earns Him a Douche Bag Award

We’re going to engrave one for retiring Republican Senator Jeff flake casting one of, if not the most important vote of his time in the Senate. Apparently, he was OK voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States while still harboring doubts.

Read more

Scalia: Not As Originalist As He’d Like to Think

So, by now everyone knows that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died over the weekend. As is usual, everyone is rushing to the airwaves to talk about what a nice and brilliant person he was. Of course I don’t know him personally, but certainly his public personae were not so nice, and I don’t think his legal reasoning, considered by many to be smart and original (pun intended), was all that brilliant. It was merely partisan and theocratic. Scalia was not really interested in the original intent of the framers. He was interested in creating a facade of intellectualism around his rulings. His genius was not in a new form of thought around the Constitution, but in a way to package his rulings so that people thought they had a grand origin.

Read more

Finding a Right in the Constitution

You’re likely aware that a number of state laws and constitutional amendments limiting the right so LGBT people to marry, have recently been found to be unconstitutional. The anti-equality pundits then issue their (now pretty standard) press releases denouncing the ruling, and explaining how the judge “found” a non-existent “right to gay marriage” in the U.S. Constitution. I’m here to theorize that one does NOT go to the Constitution to find a right.

Read more

So Stupid It Hurts-Blaming the Gays

Georgia’s reigning Ms Helmet Hair and GOP Chairwoman, Sue Everhart, called it correctly when she recently told the Marietta Daily Journal, “Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this. She got right when she went on to claim that ending DOMA would cause straight people to get gay-married just for the benefits. And, of course, since every negative event in the world must be blamed on gay people, Southern Baptist Convention President, Frank Luter, had to blame the SCOTUS hearings about gay marriage for North Korea’s increasing anti-American rhetoric. Because, you know, they’ve never been anti-American until now.

Read more

Republicans Oppose Obama's SCOTUS Nominee

The ink is barely dry on Justice David Souter’s letter of resignation from the Supreme Court, and the wingnuts in Rush Limbaugh’s Republican party are already complaining about Obama’s nominee for his replacement. The talking points are all so similar, it’s clear the effort is coordinated.

Read more

Election Day 2008

Last week with work was a real bear, and I’m traveling for work this week, so expect posting to be lite. Hopefully there won’t be that much news, especially election news, to post about. I did want to make note of a few things that have been going on. We’ll talk about some experiences with early voting, voter involvement, and the eve of election day.

Read more

The Day After – Gay Marriage

Well, it’s the day after the first full day that gay marriage was legal in California, and gosh darn it, the sun came up, birds still sang, children were born, people died, there were even some heterosexual marriages, and I still had to go to work. In other words, if God is mad about it, he sure missed that wrath thing by taking it out on the mid-west. This raises a lot of questions, such as what happens next in California, what does this mean to Florida’s Amendment 2 initiative (and see a possible connection), and what does it mean for gay people around the country.

Read more

And Another Republican Sex Scandal

As Michael at Bloggernista says, it’s been like 20 minutes since the last Repug scandal, so time for a new one. This one is especially delicious since it involves the Texas District Attorney who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Texass to keep their sodomy law which criminalized homosexuality.

Read more