ryan.freebern.org

Here is a poll conducted between February 2 and 8, 2007 that shows that Democratic candidates are leading Republicans by a significant margin when it comes to who people would vote for in the upcoming Presidential race.

Among all adults, Senator Clinton is the clear front runner. Fully 45 percent would consider voting for her compared to 37 percent for Obama, 29 percent for Giuliani, 28 percent for Edwards, 26 percent for McCain and 26 percent for Al Gore.

So the sure-fire way for Democrats to win this election? Don’t say or do anything, at all, until next November. Obviously people like you a lot right now, just the way you are. Saying and doing stuff will only serve to potentially give people a reason to change their minds. You might accidentally misspeak and make people angry, or say something ambiguous that the Republicans can spin against you.

I should be working for the DNC.

Recently, our good friend Bill O’Reilly announced (emphasis mine):

I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I’m gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that.

My question is: if a terrorist is someone who uses terror to achieve political goals, does this mean Bill O’reilly is a horrorist? Shouldn’t our government be working overtime to eliminate self-proclaimed domestic horrorists? Why haven’t we raised the horror alert level?

Bill’s horrible promise is part of his ongoing War on Decency. He is actively trying to make Christianity look like an oppressive, intolerant, hate-filled philosophy by claiming that Christians (85% of the country, he claims) think anyone who says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is effectively anti-Jesus.

Earlier, Bill said this only applies to America:

They don’t have to say “Merry Christmas” in China, OK? They can say whatever they say in China, “Happy Winter.” All right? “We like pandas.” Say whatever you want.

I think we should let Bill know that we all want him to have a wonderful holiday season this year, no matter what he celebrates. That’s why I’ve created this simple, printable “We Like Pandas!” card that you can print out, fold, add a personal greeting to, and send to him. Click here to download the PDF (275 kb). Once it’s printed, simply trim along the dotted line, then fold the paper in half twice (top-to-bottom, then left-to-right) to make it into a card that will fit nicely into a standard #10 letter envelope. Write a friendly message inside, and send your card to the following address:

Bill O’Reilly
c/o Fox News Channel
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10036

Let’s all wish Bill O’Reilly a happy holiday season! Leave a comment here if you send a card — let’s see how many of these he gets!

Ben Stein has taken a break from murmuring (in a hilarious deadpan monotone) sweet nothings to the life-size oil portrait of Dubya over his mantelpiece to write a grocery list whiny “Special Report” for The American Spectator insisting that Bush not only did everything humanly possible to help the Gulf coast from the very moment he first heard about hurricane Katrina, but he is also not responsible for absolutely anything at all, anywhere, ever.

Wait, these statements I’m making are unfair and untrue? How do you know? Probably because I, y’know, gave you a link to Ben’s piece so you could read it for yourself. And yet, in Ben’s piece, he addresses a number of issues that, apparently, he thought up himself, since he provides no attribution.

George Bush did not cause the hurricane.

Who said he did? I read the blogs of a good number of people whose views are largely anti-Bush, and yet I haven’t seen a single person claim that Bush caused the hurricane. So where did he get this from? (I’m not even going to respond to the rest of the straw men in his piece.)

It’s not George Bush’s fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans. His job description does not include making sure every adult in America has a car, is in good health, has good sense, and is mobile.

Funny, I thought the job of the President encompassed exactly that sort of thing: decrease the number of citizens living in poverty, provide better health care, and provide better education. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he’s doing very well.

George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over.

Leaving aside the fact that Ben Stein apparently thinks he can read Bush’s mind and, uh, see his soul… least racist President ever? That’s quite a claim to make. Perhaps he has appointed more racially diverse staff members than other Presidents, but that only shows that he knows how to make politically expedient appointments. I’m not saying he is racist, just that we can’t possibly know.

George Bush is rushing every bit of help he can to New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama as soon as he can. He is not a magician. It takes time to organize huge convoys of food and now they are starting to arrive.

You mean the same time it takes to play guitar at a Naval base and share a cake with John McCain? It took 5 days for the first federal response to begin for a disaster that has already cost thousands of lives and will probably cost thousands more. For comparison, the entire Senate reconvened in the middle of a vacation, introduced and passed a bill, and Bush signed it into law, in only three days when one woman in a persistent vegetative state was possibly going to be disconnected from life support.

There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency.

Clever of him to limit this statement to the response only. No, the response hasn’t been diminished. However, even Ben doesn’t try and deny that the preparation for the disaster was dreadfully underfunded due to the cost of the Iraq War.

Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed [New Orleans' recovery] process by one day.

The two things — criticizing the President and helping the entire affected area recover — are not mutually exclusive activities. The criticism that I and many others are levelling at Bush is meant to help prevent a similar terrible situation in the future, by helping people realize that Bush’s policies are leaving everything but the military underfunded and in less than capable hands. It’s perfectly possible to support the recovery effort while criticising the President, just as it’s possible to support the troops in Iraq while still thinking the Iraq War is wrong.

Imagine if Hillary Clinton had gotten her way and they were in charge of your health care.

Yeah, if we had a government-run national health care system, we might be in a terrible situation just like France.

Why is it that the snipers who shot at emergency rescuers trying to save people in hospitals and shelters are never mentioned except in passing, and Mr. Bush, who is turning over heaven and earth to rescue the victims of the storm, is endlessly vilified?

Because the snipers are lunatics in control of a single rifle, while Bush is a lunatic in control of the richest, strongest country and government on the planet. If those snipers shoot, it could end a few lives. If Bush doesn’t respond to a national crisis for five days, it could end thousands of lives. Criticising the snipers will just make people upset, but won’t have any effect on those snipers. Criticising the President may help things change for the better, since politicians tend to respond to criticism if it’s loud enough.

What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government of New Orleans for the aftereffects of Katrina?

The same ability you have, Ben.

If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?

It takes more than an able body to move out of the pathway of a hurricane. If you lived in the middle of New Orleans and had no car, and the buses and other public transportation wasn’t running, could you make it out, on foot, in time, possibly with small children in tow?

Where did the idea come from that salvation comes from hatred and criticism and mockery instead of love and co-operation?

Again, criticising the President’s past and present decisions about disaster management doesn’t detract from our ability to care about and assist the victims of this tragedy, and both of these things will, in the end, make America a better, stronger, safer place to live.

Remember that moronic court decision I posted about in May? (A judge had ruled that a Wiccan couple couldn’t expose their son to “non-mainstream” religious beliefs.) Well, I predicted it’d be overturned in a week… and it’s been overturned, three months later! I was close.

Anyway, hooray for the Indiana Court of Appeals for protecting the religion part of the First Amendment. Now hopefully these people can get back to peaceably practicing their chosen religion without an idiot judge meddling in their affairs.

Watching the election returns for the Ohio 2nd congressional district, I get a memory of the feeling of feverishly reloading the various news sites on election night last year. I’ve only marginally paid attention to this race, but now that it’s nearing the finish line, I can feel the excitement again. This is why I enjoy politics so much.

Update (11:09 p.m.):

US HOUSE Ohio 2nd Dist
753 precincts of 753 reporting
        JEAN SCHMIDT 	57,974 	52%
	PAUL HACKETT 	54,401 	48%

Allow me to further extend my admiration and congratulations to Spain, who legalized gay marriage today.

Canada, you have my sincerest admiration and respect. Congratulations to you for making same-sex marriage legal. If only those of us in other so-called enlightened nations would follow suit.

Andrés Martinez, a columnist for the L.A. Times, wrote a column yesterday entitled “Who’ll Apologize for the Filibuster? In it, he contends that rather than just apologizing for not passing anti-lynching bills, the Senate should have also apologized for using the filibuster to block passage of those bills. He goes on to claim that the filibuster is utterly worthless — even evil — and should be excised from the Senate’s toolbox, an argument that we’ve been hearing from Frist-supporters a lot lately.

This is utterly stupid. “I’m sorry I wrecked the furniture in a fit of anger, and I’m sorry I used a hammer to do it. If only we didn’t have hammers, everything would have been fine!” Martinez wants to blame the tools used for the actions of their users. According to his logic, guns should be illegal because they can be used to kill people — yet I’m sure he’s as big a supporter of the 2nd Amendment as any other Republican.

Martinez blames Democrats — specifically, Mary Landrieu, D-LA — for keeping “the f-word out of the resolution.” He thinks that the resolution as stated makes it sound like “a majority of senators were on the same moral plane” as the pro-lynching Senators who did the filibustering. How would his resolution have read? “We’re sorry about the lynchings — but it wasn’t our fault!” Helluva sincere apology there, Andrés.

He says that “[t]he filibuster is an anti-democratic instrument that upsets the delicate system of checks and balances already written into the Constitution.” Hang on, I thought that the filibuster was pretty much the last refuge of a beleaguered and largely powerless Senate minority when faced with the prospect of the majority running rampant over their rights and desires. It is the check and balance against pure majority rule in the Senate. If Martinez wants a complete and utter democracy, then why do we even have our representative republic in place? Shouldn’t all votes be put to the masses, and screw the non-whites, non-Christians, non-heterosexuals?

The filibuster is a tool. It’s a utility. It’s never going to be popular with the majority; that’s its whole point. It is the last roadblock, the final riot shield to keep the mob from running rampant over the unpopular guy. It absolutely must be kept in place if we are to keep a semblance of rationality in our Senate and fairness in our government. Removing it would be one more nail in the coffin of true democracy, and one more step down the road toward totalitarianism.

Bush and his pals in Washington made a lot of noise in March when Syria looked like it was going to pull its troops out of Lebanon. “Freedom will prevail,” Bush said. And indeed, Lebanon just held its first free elections in 30 years.

Around the time Syria was considering withdrawing, Bush stated his hope that Hezbollah would disarm and become a purely political party. “I would hope that Hezbollah would prove that they’re not [a terrorist organization], by laying down arms and not threatening peace,” he said. Well, George, Hezbollah certainly has embraced politics: it just swept the southern Lebanon election, winning all 23 seats that were up for grabs, and is expected to win more in the rest of Lebanon as well.

But how did it win? Not by “laying down arms.” Not at all. It won by running on an anti-American, pro-Syrian platform, specifically against Bush’s calls that it disarm. The people have spoken, Bush, and they want violence against America, they want to go against your will, they want terrorists in power.

Congratulations. Your plan to make the middle east safer is working like a charm.

How long until this moronic court decision gets overturned? I give it a week at most. I wouldn’t be surprised if the judge caves under public pressure and retracts it before then, though.

How do idiots like this with obvious disregard for the U.S. Constitution manage to become judges? Where along the way do they decide to just ignore some bits of the law?

Last night while driving, I was listening to John Garabedian’s radio show, “Open House Party” on the radio. He’s a DJ who plays a many-hour-long mix of dance/club/pop tunes on weekend evenings, and is syndicated across the country. While I was listening, he told this story (paraphrased; I wasn’t recording, and there’s no online streaming version of the show):

Last week, radio stations across the country received the CD of “Don’t P-H-U-N-K With My Heart”, the single from their upcoming album “Monkey Business.” Now, apparently a major broadcasting group objected to the use of the word P-H-U-N-K in the title, because they thought it sounded like another, dirtier word, so now the Black Eyed Peas are back in the studio recording a new version called “Don’t Mess With My Heart.” This is what we have to live with in this post-9/11 world under the rule of the Taliban.

While the rhetoric is rather heavy-handed, I applaud John Garabedian’s railing against censorship. I’d bet dollars to donuts he was referring to Clear Channel Communications, a media conglomerate notorious for its censorship and conservative values. But what’s next? “Play That Messy Music White Boy”? “We Want The Mess”? And that much-beloved classic 70’s rock band, “Grand Mess Railroad”?

The real culprit here isn’t Clear Channel, though, it’s the FCC and its recent massive increases in fines for “indecency.” Each incident can net them up to half a million dollars now — a huge victory for people who think the government can decide what we’re offended by more accurately than we can. True conservatives, striving for less governmental power, should be fighting tooth and nail against the mere existence of the FCC’s media-complaints division, which attempts to impose a non-majority-decided morality code on American media companies — governmental meddling at its worst. Instead, many people want the government to “protect” them and their children from words that sound bad and accidentally-exposed breasts, rather than take personal responsibility to deal with this stuff on their own.

In a sensible America, if a media company offended enough people, and those people wanted to punish that media company, they’d stop listening to/watching/buying that company’s products, and the company would be forced through market forces to change its policies. The true moral code of the majority would limit the companies’ use of words and images that actually offended them, and people would have to use their discretion before watching things that they knew might bother them, or letting their children watch television that might be unwelcome in their home.

Creators Syndicate is trying to bully a blog into removing a link to a Bill O’Reilly column, citing copyright violation. (Here’s the offending column.) This is obviously bunk, as it’s been decided in court that linking does not violate copyright. However, that doesn’t stop people from claiming that it does in order to get their way. This sort of behaviour by huge copyright-holder corporations not only makes a mockery of the whole notion of copyright, but it also threatens the entire structure of the web. If linking to something is violating its copyright, then any time anyone types <a href=”… they need someone’s permission to continue, or else risk facing a lawsuit.

On to the real reason for this post, however. I read O’Reilly’s column, about the Postcards From Buster debacle, and could hardly keep myself from laughing out loud. I thought, does anyone actually buy this sort of reasoning? Do O’Reilly’s arguments actually jive with anyone’s thought processes?

O’Reilly says that “introducing homosexuality into the little kid culture angers many Americans who believe sex in general is an inappropriate topic for small children”. I’m generally of the view that sex, as in the act and ramifications of sexual intercourse, isn’t usually an appropriate topic of discussion with small children. However, O’Reilly (and apparently the “many Americans” he refers to here) ignorantly conflates sexuality with sex. Sexuality is psychological, an ingrained preference for the company of certain other members of the species over others. It’s not the act of intercourse.

Why aren’t these “many Americans” up in arms about children’s toys or movies that show stereotypical princes and princesses getting married, having kids, and living happily ever after? That’s at least as sexual, and probably more, as showing a pair of lesbians in Vermont making maple syrup. Apparently, “many Americans” believe sex is an appropriate topic for small children as long as it’s good old-fashioned heterosexual sex.

O’Reilly asks:

I don’t want to be offensive here, but who in their right mind wants to explain Norma and Barbara’s lifestyle to their 4-year-old?

I do, Bill. How’s this? “Hey, 4-year-old child of mine. See Norma and Barbara? They love each other, just like your mother and I do.” That’s it. Explaining a homosexual relationship is as simple as that. But as long as people like Bill O’Reilly, and those who agree with him, consider homosexuality merely “selfish hedonism” (as O’Reilly’s comrade-in-arms Alan Keyes infamously said) and unworthy of being represented as a valid lifestyle, children everywhere will be taught that love only counts if it’s the “right” kind of love.