Category: Issues of the Day

From the Los Angeles Times:

Denying gay couples civil marriage violates their constitutional rights, a Washington state judge ruled today, a day after voters in Missouri approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.

“The court concludes that the exclusion of same-sex partners from civil marriage and the privileges attendant thereto is not rationally related to any legitimate or compelling state interest and is certainly not narrowly tailored toward such an interest,” Judge William L. Downing of King County Superior Court wrote.

He stayed his ruling pending review by the state Supreme Court.

Courtesy Wacky Neighbor.

Tom Burka on the latest terror threat:

Citicorp employees collectively railed against the fact that the Bush Administration yesterday announced an “orange alert” for a threat to their building which, it turns out, was based upon documents that were three or four years old. Employees were angry because, they said, they should have been given the four years off while higher-ups “worked to counter the threat.”

“Do you know what I could have done with that time?’ said Sally Ackerman, who works in Accounts Receivable.

“Dude,” said Larry Hammerman, a 28-year-old filing clerk, “I coulda probably finished, like, playing the entire PlayStation 2 catalogue.”

Citicorp has a little known policy that employees may take “emergency leave” during a bomb threat. “And the way I see it is, this is like a bomb threat that has been goin’ on for like four damn years,” said Hammerman.

NewMexiKen prays these threats continue their role as straight lines.

NewMexiKen also remembers working at a couple of places that received serious bomb threats. It’s no fun when it’s serious, though on a nice day we did occasionally remark that the threatening call had come in over the internal phone lines.

A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, “Wolf! Wolf!” and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains.

The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: “Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep”; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock.

There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.

From The Atlantic:

Looking at the gambling boom years of the 1990s, when casino revenues more than tripled nationally, the researchers conclude that counties with casinos suffered individual bankruptcy rates more than double the rates in demographically similar counties without casinos. But the bankruptcy rate for businesses in these “casino counties” was 35 percent lower than in their betting-free counterparts.

Remember Bill Nevins, the Rio Rancho High School teacher who claimed he was fired for supporting free speech; specifically for helping organize a poetry club and because a student wrote an anti-Iraq, anti-Bush poem? NewMexiKen reported on the story in May. And then someone commenting here said maybe he was just not re-hired (which I guess is different than being fired).

Well, the Rio Rancho district settled with him for $205,000 according to The Albuquerque Tribune.

Gen. JC Christian, patriot has written Tom Ridge. Don’t miss it!

From The New York Times:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

Just in case your news source doesn’t tell you the “rest of the story” —

President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger — who’d been accused of stealing classified material from the National Archives — has been cleared of all wrongdoing.

The National Archives and the Justice Department have concluded nothing is missing and nothing in the Clinton administration’s record was withheld from the 9-11 Commission.

The Wall Street Journal reports archives staff have accounted for all classified documents Berger looked at.

Source: KYW News via Atrios

From AP via Yahoo! News:

The FBI warned police in California and New Mexico that it received information about possible terrorist activity in their states. However, the warning wasn’t specific about particular targets or a method of attack, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday.

The FBI decided to pass along the threat information but warned that it was considered unsubstantiated and uncorroborated, said the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Link and emphasis via Quirky Burque.

(The problem with the crying wolf analogy of course, is that Aesop’s story has an unhappy ending.)

From news reports:

As many as 195,000 people a year could be dying in U.S. hospitals because of easily prevented errors, a company said on Tuesday in an estimate that doubles previous figures.

The findings would make medical mistakes the third-leading cause of death in the country, behind heart disease and cancer.

Here’s the report from Reuters.

Powerful stuff from Rivka at Respectful of Otters. She will make you think in yet another way about abortion.

Link via Michael Bérubé.

Jesus’ General writes a letter to Army Inspector General Mikolashek.

(Photo from Jesus’ General.)

“In a speech the other day to the Amish, President Bush said that God speaks through him. That’s what he said. I don’t know, do you think God would mispronounce that many words?”

“President Bush said today he is looking into if Iran had anything to do with 9/11, but he’s not declaring war yet. He said first he wants to know all the facts — so apparently he’s trying a new strategy.”

“The Bush administration announced this week they want to lift the ban on logging. This is part of their No Tree Left Behind program.”

Jay Leno

“To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the moon landing, President Bush met with Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong. … There was one awkward moment, when Bush said to Armstrong, ‘I hear you’re doing great in the Tour-de-France.'”

Conan O’Brien

NewMexiKen doesn’t know Sandy Berger, the Clinton national security advisor accused of removing copies of classified documents from the National Archives. I certainly don’t know what he actually did or—least of all—why he did it. But let me suggest something.

Let’s put together a team and make spot inspections of private document collections of a few high-level national security political appointees from each of the last several administrations. You know, drop by their home or office and just browse through the files. Any one care to wager we won’t find that most or all of them have classified documents in their possession?

Why do they do this? Because they can. Because they are arrogant and think they are above the law. Because they feel they will protect the documents well enough. Because the bureaucrats charged with securing classified documents won’t always check or challenge what appointees remove when they leave.

It happens all the time.

Berger, if guilty, was just more obvious than most.

The Daily Howler (Bob Somerby) has some suggestions for NewMexiKen’s former colleagues:

Meanwhile, add the National Archives to the list of deeply dysfunctional agencies. Apparently, they only keep close watch on their documents after they think that some are missing. Would it kill them to number and monitor documents before they think that some have been swiped? Let’s see—could they actually keep track of the documents a person takes, then make him return them before he leaves? That’s how it works at our public library. Any chance that Archives staff could check out this complex arrangement?

The ACLU shows what ordering a pizza could be like (video).

From The Washington Post:

Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives until 8 p.m.

What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the same Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him were also watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.

After Berger’s previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal sources familiar with the case.

From The Corner —

Mr. Goldberg —

My wife & I were at the Linda Ronstadt performance in question, at the Aladdin in Las Vegas, and quite frankly, Aladdin President Bill Timmins’ account of what happened is complete crap. There was mixed booing and cheering at Ronstadt’s pro-Michael Moore comment, and that was about the extent of the “bedlam” that supposedly broke out. I saw no posters being torn down or cocktails being thrown in the air, and if people stomped out of the theatre unhappy, it was because 1) that was the last song Ronstadt performed; it was her encore; and 2) she mainly sang her standards repertoire, with the Nelson Riddle orchestrations, and a large part of the crowd wanted to hear more of her rock-‘n’-roll stuff; she got the biggest round of applause for doing a lackadaisical run-through of her version of “Blue Bayou.”

Frankly, my suspicion is that Timmins is way overdramatizing what happened, in order to justify giving Ronstadt the boot. It simply wasn’t that big a deal.

One way to supplement the Army might be to draft all the GI Joes driving around town in Hummers.

Republicans who voted to block the amendment were Susan M. Collins (Maine), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), John E. Sununu (N.H.), Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.), Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Colo.) and John McCain (Ariz.). Democrats who voted to bring up the amendment were Zell Miller (Ga.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.).

You have got to click over to Wonkette to see this photo of Pat Boone. And read the caption.

“We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

Abraham Lincoln, November 10, 1864