They Paused to Comment

Virginia Thomas made that fateful phone call a few days ago trying to get a message to Anita Hill that she thinks Anita should apologize to her husband for making those sexual harassment charges in 1991. There are roomers that she made this phone call after a night of drinking and wasn’t entirely sober. At any rate Anita Hill told her there were absolutely no grounds for an apology. As you know Clarence Thomas said at the senate hearing that these sexual charges amounted to a “High Tech Lynching”, and people like Larry Elder bought into that even though Larry on other occasions has condemned people playing the race card. Virginia Thomas is the member of some ultra conservative group like the liberty lobby or something. There is serious question whether as a couple they aren’t violating the rule against judicial bias in handing down decisions. Others say there are severe conflicts of interest and that that many of the Bush justice appointees hang out with the Koch brothers and stuff and are in the back pocket of lobbyists anyhow. I don’t think Clarence Thomas in particular has ever had the “judicial temperament” to even be a high court justice, and I would not have voted to confirm him. He doesn’t ask questions during hearings, which to me seems really strange. He’s pretty much already made up his mind before even hearing the facts. Impeachment charges should be brought against several right wing justices for violations of interest where they should recuse themselves, or else for violating their pledge to uphold “settled law” in their rulings. Just because we've never impeached justices before for "bad behavior" doesn't mean we shouldn't start now. If you issue rulings like the Citizens United case, you have gone against a hundred years of settled law.

Tom Mc Clintock has made some interesting statements lately. He says that the Republicans really don’t deserve a chance to run the government any more than the democrats do. Mc Clintock ran for governor against Swartzenegger in 2003 as a conservative, and at the time I thought a lot of his ideas made sense. It’s interesting to hear him weigh in on these tea party people. He doesn’t believe most of them are qualified. He has said that Meg Whitman isn't a true conservative. Judy and my other right winger friends have also made this charge. Now we have this cleaver commercial about both Swartzenegger and Whitman saying "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". The implication seems to be is that conservatives will find themselves disillusioned with Whitman just as they now are with Swartzenegger. Further he says that Republicans avoid the damage that George Bush did to our economy with their selective memory. And he is absolutely right.

John Mc Cain lashed out at Barbra Boxer a few days ago. He said that she was harder to deal with than any other senator he’s had the displeasure of serving with and that she runs up deficits and he made a bunch of other charges against her. Mc Cain has turned basically into a cranky old man.

Well it seems as of last night some court once again reinstated Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell, in the military. There may have been a few gays that tried to enlist openly in that small window that was created by the court ruling of last week. Now the question is once they have said they are gay, do we kick these people out of the military after they were accepted just days earlier? Obama says that “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” is going to end on his watch, but this may be just another in the stream of broken promises.

One person wrote a book in which he says he almost shot president Johnson just days after he assumed the office as President in November of 1963. This secret service agent says he saw a shadowy figure walking across a darkened front yard and he aimed his service revolver at him and almost fired. In another case of a Presidential crisis, it seems that not once but twice the Clinton administration lost the codes to the nuclear “football” to issue launch codes in case of a nuclear confrontation. They looked all around the white house and I think it was in a shirt pocked that was taken to the cleaners or something. Anyhow it’s a good thing that a nuclear crisis didn’t occur over this.

There is a lot of talk in the news about gay bullying in the schools and such that isn’t being addressed by the authorities. I’m sure these incidents have always gone on. But now Focus on the Family is saying that being gay ought to be exempted from anti bullying statutes lest the schools be on record as being pro homosexuality. In spite of this they say that being gay is generally accepted by the younger generation. I don’t know how children in Christian schools are conditioned to deal with gay youngsters they might meet on the outside. We older people of course will continue to feel uncomfortable about the whole topic of homosexuality being in any way NOT being considered an abnormality that needs to be addressed. Even though it may be biological, it still isn’t a good idea to expose young people to gay teachers and run the risk that their homosexual proclivities might rub off onto the students. That is my opinion, anyhow.

There seem to be a lot of reports of a democratic counter tide in the latest polling of various senate and house and gubernatorial races. The democrats still are clinging to a thin lead even here in California with Boxer and Brown, and proposition 19 seems to be leading just barely. Once again it is conjectured that proposition 19 will bring a lot of left leaning people to the polls who otherwise wouldn’t vote, and this will help Brown and Boxer. Other regions of the country have tried conservative initiatives to bring out their people to the polls. I guess what bothers me is that in 2004 people were saying the same thing about this time of year, how John Kerry was pulling ahead in the polls. But none of it showed up on election day. I am worried about that “red shift” and as far as I can see the basic problems with electronic balloting have not been resolved. Of course you know that “red shifted” light can also be called “retarded” light because the waves from the light are retarded in their arrival. (“Slowed down, for you people in Rio Linda”) I think “retarded” is a perfectly proper generic word to describe people who are otherwise “mentally challenged”. Indeed the use of the phrase “Mentally Retarded” was a replacement for other more descriptive terms like moron, idiot, and imbecile. But these words, too, are generic, in that they describe a specific severity of mental retardation. What I’m worried about is a “mental retarding” of the electoral tally on election day.