Enemy Combatant
Sunday, May 25, 2003
Question: If there really WERE a liberal media,
wouldn't conservatives be OPPOSED to further media
consolidation?
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Heh heh. This story's got LEGS, folks:
Question: Why is Leung like Watergate?
I've been following the leung story very closely. This is a cautious summary of what is known publicly, although no mainstreamer has connected the dots or raised the suppositions in a clear way:
Katrina Leung, a GOP fundraiser/contributor, appears also to have been a conduit for illegal campaign donations from the Chinese government and others to Republican candidates, according to reputable reports, during the time she was also an important FBI asset. Her handler and lover JJ Smith was heavily involved in the investigation of similar activities involving the Democrats and the Chinese. These investigations have recently been called into question by people closely involved with them.
If Leung was illegally funneling money to Republicans, it seems more than likely that Smith, an important FBI official, knew about it. It raises the question of whether he was actively involved in it himself and whether he was encouraged to do so by others, perhaps at the FBI.
As much of the information regarding the scandals came from Leung herself, the case also raises concerns that the investigations into alleged Democratic/Chinese illegalities were a diversion, to deflect attention away from the flow of some $2.5 million into Republican war chests from the Chinese.
This is similar to what Watergate looked like early on, a lot of impossible to believe weird facts that sort of, but didn't quite fit.
tristero
Something tells me the idea of the GOP as the REAL ChiCom-cash-cow will not go over well in the American heartland . . .
Friday, May 02, 2003
Reason #437 why Santorum is an idiot
I've been thinking long and hard about this "right to privacy" issue, given voice by quite possibly the Senate's dimmest member (a noun I use euphemistically), and I realize that we need to change the terminology if we ever want to draw a few libertarian conservatives to our side.
From now on, it's NOT "the right to privacy" -- it's "the right to be left alone" -- get it? Good.
Now let's take a quick, strict-constructionist look at the Ninth Amendment -- it says,
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
My read on that is that while the government is given limited, enumerated powers, certain other rights not expressly enumerated under the Constitution are nonetheless to be protected from government encroachment.
In other words, the "right to be left alone."
Now, what's this got to do with Santorum, you ask? Well, let's look at the kernel upon which Roe v. Wade is built: Griswold v. Connecticut. This 1965 US Supreme Court decision established that -- for married heterosexual couples at least -- there was (and still is, last I checked) a constitutional right to access to birth control devices. (The heavily Catholic Connecticut legislature had banned the sale of all such devices -- the pill, IUDs, condoms -- virtually everything. The Court expanded this ruling as applicable to nonmarried couples in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.)
But what does Griswold rely on as precedent? Primarily two cases, from the 1920s: Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and Meyer v. Nebraska.
Pierce established that, under the Constitution, the state legislature could not require every high school student to attend public school -- an obvious attempt to destroy (or at least marginalize) Catholic schools.
Meyer stands for the proposition that parents' rights to educate their children trumps the state government's claim that it had the right to ban the teaching of the German language, even in private schools.
Before Santorum and other RW idiots begin pulling at this thread, they ought to consider taking a look at everything they'll unravel.
