“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”

Jonathan Swift
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"The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital." - Bill Maher
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"The city is crowded my friends are away and I'm on my own
It's too hot to handle so I gotta get up and go

It's a cruel ... cruel summer"

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Tuesday Briefs: Emissions and Omissions

·Carbon based liberals. Leave it to the Amarillo Globe-News to praise the new Carbon Monitoring for Action data base with one hand and damn it with the other, finding its “slant is apparent,” but then the AGN’s editorial writers know a thing or two about slant. They find it highly suspicious that corporate influence over public policy is being exposed, and that CARMA’s effort is being supported by those dread environmentalists. If only the power companies were running the data base then everything would be just fine.

After a little tiff over a link connecting George W. Bush to a major polluter comes this funny line: “Who are the top idiots who continue to say global warming is still just ‘speculation’?” Well, how about the 98 out of 100 people who write to and editorialize in the Amarillo Globe-News you dunce?

If the AGN thinks CARMA and its “Survey's worth is suspect” let’s remember these critics are the same people that are anti-science, that believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs walked alongside man, and since the Bible is inerrant, they must think the Earth is flat, the moon is its own light source, and pi is 3. Intelligent Design indeed.

·Eddie McMurray strikes again. Eddie “Mick the Stick”1 McMurray, one of the Amarillo Globe-News’ more incensed wing-nut contributors, blames the low ratings of Congress on their
"appetite for spending on social programs." Mick the Stick, apparently frustrated that his solution to welfare hasn’t been implemented by having the poor put in concentration camps and his barbed-wire investments haven’t paid off, apparently didn’t notice that Congress’ ratings fell when they failed to push back on Bush’s war policy and his undermining of the Constitution.

Poor Eddie, charming rabid ideologue that he is, does get a lot of things wrong. Convinced Clinton was impeached and found guilty and that Valerie Plame wasn’t a covert CIA agent (well, what conservative moon-bat doesn’t?), he is one certified blithering nut case always ready to tear into liberals, and so for the Amarillo Globe-News, a keeper. KABLAAM!

·Kanelis says no to
term limits. Even an argument by a Republican that enthralls Kanelis can’t persuade him to be against term limits. Longtime seniority builds power and empires within Congress, forcing other legislators to bend to their will.

“It's the power, stupid, that makes the system stink to high heaven,” says Kanelis. But his famous nose doesn’t wrinkle. Difficult campaigns against entrenched incumbents be damned. Voters can get rid of an incumbent if they are doing a poor job. Kanelis picks Democrat Bill Sarpalius in 1994 as his example, booted out by the energetic Mac Thornberry.

“What's the lesson here? It all goes to show that term limits already exist.”
What Kanelis fails to mention2 is that Thornberry rode in on the Republican tide of the “Contract on America” reform package, one of its items being term limits. Republicans used it to beat Democrats’ brains out during the campaign as the only way to curb the abuse of power.

Thornberry championed term limits, but once in office that whole limit thingy just went away, and Kanelis has been making excuses for him ever since: Well, Thornberry supported it, but he didn’t promise anything! Now JQK doesn’t even mention it.

And seven terms later Thornberry is still doing an excellent job because the Amarillo Globe-News, totally unbiased, says so. Well, there was that shield law thingy that showed a little daylight between Kanelis’ nose and Thornberry’s bottom, but until Mac the rancher does something a little untoward, like being caught in a hotel room with an underage sheep again, he pretty much has no limit to his terms.

Auf Wiedersehen!

1A nickname amongst his “friends” as Eddie, a bit of a hothead, tends to blow his top like a “stick” of dynamite. Also a veiled reference to a euphemism for a part of the male anatomy, as some think that’s what Eddie is.

2Kanelis evidently has been taking H*nry lessons and omits anything that might un-slant his argument. Well done JQK!



Post Script

Kudos to
Bruce Fielder for touching upon the inconsistency between term limits imposed on the presidency (by Republicans against a Democrat by the way) and none on congressmen and senators, and Andrea Cheryl Holman for pointing out the media’s fawning over incumbents.

With the overwhelming advantage enjoyed by incumbents, JQK’s characterization of elections as job performance reviews essentially reduces them to rubberstamp plebiscites.