More 'Global Warming' Nonsense. As much of the Nation is coated in ice, and millions of people are without power and thus in serious risk of freezing to death, because thermostats won't work and the pumps for oil and gas furnaces won't work without electricity, the moron Al Gore came to Washington yesterday to try to alarm Congress about "man-made global warming". There is no end to that fool's delusionality
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Redistrict the Bastards Away. The Republican Party members still in Congress are there mainly because almost all state legislatures gerrymander nowadays, producing "safe" districts in almost all cases, in which one party or the other is almost certain to control a given district. Because it is so hard to succeed in contesting these "safe" districts, so that there is no chance for the public to oust a Congressman who is unresponsive and out of touch, Congress is saddled with ossified stances that do not adjust to changed circumstances. We need to impose national standards for nonpartisan, uncontrived redistricting of the NATIONAL legislature's districts. This should NEVER have been under the control of the states. Never.
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And the standard should be plain: the ONLY considerations to be used in drawing boundaries should be (a) compactness and spatial regularity of the resulting district and (b) equal number of citizen residents. Congress can and must demand that districting be done by COMPUTER such that only citizen-population figures and geography are entered into the database, and then the computer program starts at either the northernmost or westernmost point (depending on the shape of the state: for NJ, northernmost, for TN westernmost) and proceeds north-to-south, west-to-east thru the entire state (in the fashion of reading text on a page), creating districts as close to square as possible, heeding only residential property lines (so that no one house is split between districts). No heed to party affiliation; no heed to prior voting patterns; no heed to municipal or county boundaries, only to rough equality of citizen populations (that is, people entitled to vote) and, where numerous, nonvoting legal residents (who are entitled to be here and must obey laws made by people they do not yet have the right to vote for). Geographical irregularities would be accommodated only in cases like small islands that could not have more than one voting place and are too distant from adjoining islands or a mainland for voters to get to a voting place easily).
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The right to draw boundaries between Congressional districts should be taken away from states and given to Congress itself. Congress does not draw state boundaries. Why should state legislatures — which may themselves be districted undemocratically — have the power to draw Congressional boundaries?
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Octuplets! The doctors and parents responsible for the recent birth of octuplets need to be PUNISHED. This planet is already grotesquely overpopulated. To the extent there is any planetary stress at all, it is due to overpopulation, and we are permitting irresponsible lunatics to flood this overburdened world with LITTERS of babies? Outrageous.
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If nature says a heterosexual couple should not have children, they should accept that judgment and either work around it — adopting an unrelated baby already here, or, if only one would-be parent is infertile, a third party can be engaged to produce a baby that bears half the couple's genes. Or the marriage should be dissolved — after all, the Radical Right keeps telling us over and over that marriage is for producing children, so, by that reasoning, people who can't have children should not be married.
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Infertility is a blessing to the planet, but quacks are undoing the good of natural population control to increase the overpopulation of this weeping world. They must be stopped.
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When fertility treatments produce multiple births, and especially four, five, six, seven, and even, now, eight babies, the babies should be taken away from those irresponsible and selfish people and distributed to people waiting to adopt a baby, and both parents and doctors IRREVERSIBLY STERILIZED surgically.
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The Bellflower octuplets, it was revealed today, were born to an UNMARRIED woman who already had SIX CHILDREN!, and who lives with her parents, not even supporting herself. Did she nonetheless take fertility treatments? Who would give fertility treatments to a woman in such a situation? Could she possibly have had eight children without fertility treatments? If this was just a freak accident, that's one thing, which warrants no punishment. But if she asked for fertility treatments even tho she already had 6 children, it was the responsibility of every reputable medical practitioner to say NO! Every reputable medical practitioner should now be willing to tie that woman's tubes so this outrage never recurs.
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Forget Bipartisanship — This Is WAR. The Republican Party yesterday spit upon President Obama's attempt to reach out to them, by voting unanimously against the Administration's proposed stimulus package. Democrats did not need any Republican votes to pass the measure by a very wide margin, and should just forget about even attempting to accommodate Republicans. Indeed, Dems should now reconsider whether they want to put back into the bill every single provision they took out in a vain attempt to mollify Republican scumbags, and take OUT of the bill every inadvisable feature they put in only to seek bipartisan support, then RAM IT THRU over the objection of the Republicans.
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Democrats should CRUSH the Republican Party. Knock it down, stomp on its throat, crush its larynx, and make it die, unable to speak or even gasp for breath. The present-day Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy of horrible, subhuman scum. If there were any way to prosecute them under RICO for crimes against humanity, torture, war crimes, willfully stealing from the poor and middle class to give to the rich, it should be done.
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Democrats need to tell the poor white trash of the South and, in lesser measure, Midwest that the Republican Party HATES them and has done everything within its power to ruin their lives, bury them in debt, and make them wage and debt slaves to the rich.
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Democrats should as well immediately move to bring Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands into the Union merged into a 51st State, to solidify their unchallengeable control of both houses of Congress by adding two (likely) Democratic Senators and six (likely) Democratic Representatives.
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CBS Evening News at 8? I tuned to what should have been the sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine at 8:00pm last nite and found instead the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. I checked backwards with my cable system's information feature and saw that it appeared to be a repeat of the regular 6:30pm showing. What a great idea. Unfortunately, it's a one-shot deal, not a regular feature.
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Young people may not know that all three of the major national newscasts used to be at 7pm. During one such 7pm broadcast, NBC News reported, decades ago, that longer work hours and longer commutes were producing declining ratings for the evening newscasts. Within six months of that report, all three moved their newscasts a half hour EARLIER. Not later. Earlier. You see, there were people at the top of the nets that wanted to eliminate the costly newscasts altogether, but they couldn't justify it under their pledge to serve the people's interest in exchange for use of "the people's airwaves", so they contrived to reduce the ratings so much that they could tell the Government that the people don't want to see a national newscast, but prefer local news, which they wanted to expand, or simply watch entertainment programming instead. The Government and media commentators didn't buy into that, but the three major networks continued to show the news at the earlier, 6:30 time, even tho they knew that moving the newscasts earlier meant that each year, more and more Americans would not be able to watch them, because working hours and commute times continued to increase.
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If CBS had decided to offer people who get home late a second chance to catch the national newscast as a regular thing rather than a one-time showing, that would have been great. It might have produced similar rescheduling, at least back to 7pm, by the other networks (in English and Spanish), which would have produced a significant benefit in public-policy terms for helping the electorate become more widely knowledgeable of public issues. But as an attempt to boost the regular newscast in its regular 6:30 slot, it falls far short of serving the public interest.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,236 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:21 PM