Monthly Archives: June 2003

Frist in Your Home

This entry was posted in Constitution on by

Bill Frist, our exemplary senate majority leader, has this to say about Lawrence v Texas:

“I have this fear that this zone of privacy that we all want protected in our own homes is gradually � or I’m concerned about the potential for it gradually being encroached upon, where criminal activity within the home would in some way be condoned,” Frist told ABC’s This Week.
“And I’m thinking of � whether it’s prostitution or illegal commercial drug activity in the home … to have the courts come in, in this zone of privacy, and begin to define it gives me some concern.”

This, from MaxSpeak is the best response to Frist that I’ve so far seen:

Lacking any principled criticism of homosexuality that they are willing to make public, our own domestic Taliban has to segue to shit-for-brains analogies to criminal behavior.**

Being a congress critter Frist probably thinks he and his ilk are in congress to tell us who we can kiss and probably would probably like to prescribe our reading list as well :

Frist said Sunday he respects the Supreme Court decision but feels the justices overstepped their bounds.
“Generally, I think matters such as sodomy should be addressed by the state legislatures,” Frist said. “That’s where those decisions � with the local norms, the local mores � are being able to have their input in reflected.
“And that’s where it should be decided, and not in the courts.”

I think the court has just explained to Frist and all those state legislatures that the area of consensual adult behavior is not a subject for legislation, that the tyranny of local norms and mores is coming to an end, that even a majority of congess critters shall not infringe our human rights. The battles are far from over but Lawrence is a big step.

**Bilmon, in the MaxSpeak comment thread, asks: “Aren’t you being a little unfair to shit?”

Update: Mike Silverman has a graphic depiction of how to deal with Frist, et al.

Check it Out

This entry was posted in Iraq Journalism War on Terrorism on by

Tim Porter tells us that the media is under using one of the basic tenets of journalism:

� Check it out. And that seems to be the culprit behind many of today’s journalism scandals – as a well the perception by the public that the press is not paying attention. They’re not checking it out enough. Jayson Blair – check him out. George Bush – check him out. Weapons of mass destruction – check them out.

Tim was reminded of this when reading . . . Bring Back the Skeptical Press by Gilbert Cranberg in yesterday’s Washington Post. Cranberg takes the media to task for not checking the facts:

The Bush administration has been taking heavy flak for its as yet unproved claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. In fixing blame for the way the public appears to have been sold a bill of goods, don’t overlook the part played by the media. Instead of closely questioning the administration’s case, the nation’s newspaper editorialists basically nodded in agreement.

Read the piece for Cranberg’s analysis of editorial response to Colin Powell’s WMD presentation to the Security Council. Sometimes trying to be current and timely can be a disservice to your constituency:

but the downside of instant analysis is the scant time it leaves for careful reporting and reflection. I learned in my many years of editorial writing to follow I.F. Stone’s prudent advice to read texts and not to rush to judgment. None of these publications evidently realized, or noted, how Powell had embellished some facts, although that is readily apparent from a close reading of his text.
If the first casualty of war is truth, the media will need to be a lot more skeptical and alert to minimize the toll on truth.

I’m not a journalist and haven’t absorbed basic tools of the trade like ‘check it out.’ But I’m learning them and this means that my posts are often taking me longer to write then when I started blogging. I’ve learned that anything that has a fact in the text needs to be verified: sometimes the fact is just right, other times my memory served it up wrong and once in a while I fat finger the keyboard.
Via The Rhetorica Network

Why America?

This entry was posted in Politics on by

Dinesh D’Souza provides mandatory 4th of July reading for all of us:

In America, by contrast, you get to write the script of your own life. What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice – these are all decisions that, in America, we make for ourselves. Here we are the architects of our own destiny.

Read the rest!
Via Outside the Beltway.

Democracy in Iraq?

This entry was posted in Iraq on by

From The Daily Kos:

How long will it take until the Shia clerics pick up their weapons and give the order for an uprising?

From the Whisky Bar at closing time:

So how long will it be before the administration and/or its apologists start telling us that “this war was never about democracy in Iraq”?

Got answers?