Speaking of Moral Values - the "DeLay Rule"

Everything you could possibly want to know and more about the Delay rule can be found at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. He's been fairly obsessive about the whole thing, to the point of doing individual posts for every congressman who has come out with whether they were for or against the new rule.

What I've been wondering is how long it would take before the DeLay thugs started going whole-hog smearing the Texas DA, Ronnie Earle, who started the proceedings that have led to the indictment of two DeLay cronies, and is threatening to lead to the indictment of DeLay himself. Fortunately, Ronnie Earle has lobbed a wonderfully concise and eloquent preemptive strike, in the form of this editorial in the New York Times. Among other things, it's kind of hard to accuse a man of partisanship against a Republican when the vast majority of the elected officials that he's brought to justice over the years have been Democrats. But the article goes far beyond that. A very good read.

More on the Moral Right

This is a long transcript from a great interview on Now with Bill Moyers with, among others, Sister Joan Chittister, a brilliant, liberal Catholic nun. My favorite quote, a great condensation of an enormous hypocrisy that I've questioned my parents on countless times over the years:

But I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth.

The Moral Right

Meanwhile, I’ve been holding off on sending a missive I’ve been compiling for my parents comparing the “moral” red states with the “amoral” blue states. Sick and tired as I am of them reading these damn stupid books by the likes of Tammy Bruce detailing the pagan scourge that is the “liberal elite agenda” in this country, I found it curious that Massachusetts, the state which is such a notorious bastion of “activist judges” who are trying to undermine marriage in this country by making it available to homosexuals, strangely enough has the lowest divorce rate in the country, and has for a long, long time. Meanwhile, the rest of the top ten states with the lowest divorce rates are also liberal blue states, while all of the worst states for divorce rates are conservative red states, mostly planted right in the Bible belt. Which makes me understand why they don’t want those damn liberal activist judges “devaluing marriage”, since they’re having such a damn hard time valuing it themselves… Domestic violence rates and homicide rates follow a similar trend. The only statistic I saw that gave credence to the moral righteousness of the moral conservative half of this country was the fact that they do give a sizably higher percentage of their incomes to charity – a lesson from which we blue-staters could learn.

William D'Antonio has written a fantastic article about this subject...

Fun with Republicans

I needed to take a break from politics for a while (not that I did, not really) and step back – start reading “real” books again – and in whatever manner get a little perspective again. Also, I was curious to see what would happen this go around, and possibly just let myself be entertained by the absurdity of it all. Thus far, only three weeks post-election, the Republicans have not disappointed. Kevin Drum has a good summation of recent congressional hijinks here.

For Bush’s part, the antics haven’t been quite so free-spirited. Mostly so far we’ve seen Colin depart to make room for Condi (a switch that most are eying with a great deal of skepticism), and Rummy not making any moves to leave. Ann Coulter, of course, suggests that liberals who talk about their misgivings with Condi are just “typical racist, anti-feminist liberals”. While she’s just doing her “shocking” thing, I wonder how this accounts for liberals (and not-so-liberals) who have even graver problems with Rummy staying on as Defense Secretary. I guess not only do we have problems with black women, we’re apparently not so keen on white men either. Time to bring in the Asian eunuchs…