Ginsburg Sounds the Alarm

Linda Greenhouse's discussion in today's NYTimes about the extraordinary oral dissent Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave on Tuesday in the equal pay for women disparity case is must reading.

Oral dissents are quite rare on the court, and quite dramatic in their import. Ginsburg has now given TWO this term, the first one over the partial birth abortion case. Clearly, Ginsburg sees the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas/Whatisname majority as attempting to impose their politics on the law, especially the law regarding equal rights for women.

Somebody better be listening.

Soon -- but not soon enough -- we shall be free of the neocons in the White House, but we'll not be free of the neocons on the Bush court for decades possibly. Ginsburg is now shouting it from the rooftops ... BE AWARE OF WHAT THEY'RE UP TO!

The Best Republican in the World

We know you think we'll give this award to Ron Paul, but today it's Thomas E. Boney Jr., publisher of The Alamance News in Graham, N.C., who got himself arrested yesterday for refusing to leave a meeting of the Burlington-Alamance Airport Authority. Details in the W-S Journal here.

We like open meetings. Even more, we like newspaper publishers willing to go to jail to challenge the secretness of some government officials.

Boney is already well known for forcing the light of day onto elected servants of the people. In 2002, Boney was preemptively sued by the Burlington City Council in an attempt to prevent him from challenging one of their closed meetings. Boney eventually won that case in the North Carolina Supreme Court.

At Long Last ... an ACTOR!

Republicans are craving an authority figure, an authoritarian authority figure, and Fred Thompson has played in the movies a White House chief of staff, a director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a highly placed F.B.I. agent, a rear admiral, numerous military brass, a senator, and (at least twice) president of the United States. He's the go-to guy for projecting governmental power -- absolutely perfecto, in other words, for the Party of Smaller Government!

He also has incurable non-Hodgkin lymphoma, an "indolent" form of the cancer that so far has been treatable with Rituxan.

He used to be a crusader against governmental corruption. Back in the late 1970s he helped bring down Tennessee Gov. Ray Blanton for selling prison pardons, and of course he's the dude that got to ask Alexander Butterfield, "Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?"

Conservatives want to make him over as an arch-conservative, and Mr. Thompson seems quite willing to assist in the renovation. It's the great thing about actors: they're malleable molds into which one can pour the character one wishes to see.

Moral Superiority: It's All a Matter of Timing

Indicted former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, on his numerous "proudest moments" and how his own immorality was more moral than Newt Gingrich's immorality (via Huffington Post):

DeLay criticizes Gingrich for, among other things, conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich's third wife.) "Yes, I don't think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment," DeLay said. "You can't do that if you're keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs." He added that the impeachment trial was another of his "proudest moments." The difference between his own adultery and Gingrich's, he said, "is that I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There's a big difference." He added, "Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time."

Proving, we suppose, that pompous self-righteousness eventually becomes its own best parody.

He's Still Talking, But Is Anyone Listening?

The man who's used Osama bin Laden as the bogeyman to scare the daylights out of anyone who'd question his "war on terror" is now outraged -- OUTRAGED -- that other people are using fear tactics about illegal immigrants to defeat a proposed overhaul of immigration law.

El Presidente said in Georgia yesterday:

"I'm sure you've heard some of the talk out there about people defining the bill. It's clear they hadn't read the bill. They're speculating about what the bill says, and they're trying to rile up people's emotions"--

Imagine that! Riling up people's emotions for crass political purposes!

"If you want to kill the bill," the president continued, "if you don't want to do what's right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people. Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all."

"Solving this problem once and for all" means guaranteeing a cheap labor source for eternity.

So Much for "Values Voters"

Politico is reporting that social conservatives have decided to throw their gawd-awful "values" overboard and back the pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control candidate by the name of Rudy Giuliani. (Well, actually it's the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that collected the data, showing that some 30 percent of the "Christian bloc" backs Rudy. The next closest contender for the Christian vote is McCain, with 22 percent.)

Expediency, thy name is Christian conservative!

You gonna proclaim pretty soon, we guess, that thrice-married Rudy's ordained by God, right?

Learning in a Deeper Shade of Green

If our county officials come through with what they've promised -- a "green" new high school suffused with natural lighting and the latest in energy-saving features -- Watauga County will be in the forefront of a national movement.

Some 27 schools have received "green certification" from the U.S. Green Building Council. About 300 more are awaiting that certification. One of the first certified green schools in the U.S. was the Third Creek Elementary School in Statesville.

We look forward to the day that Watauga High School is on that certified list. It'll be one more thing to be proud of about the new school.

Tiny Kings and God's Voice

"Party Unfaithful" by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker makes for fascinating reading ... from which, come these:

Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma .... is helping to lead an effort among some conservatives to curtail the President's power in such areas as warrantless wiretapping. "This Administration is beyond the pale in terms of arrogance and incompetence," he said. "This guy thinks he's a monarch, and that's scary as hell."

"God has spoken to me," [Tom DeLay] said. "I listen to God, and what I've heard is that I'm supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn't be underestimated."

The picture that emerges is of an imploding Republican Party, looking for guilty parties to blame. Among the "saviors" waiting to resurrect it ... Newt Gingrich, who, though he doesn't exactly claim God is speaking to him, obviously DOES hear voices and who pronounces Karl Rove's 2004 wedge campaign "maniacally dumb" for setting the GOP up for the ultimate failures of 2006.

The Bush Power Grab

Jerome Corsi was the guest on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" this a.m., talking about this article of his in WorldNetDaily ... about certain executive orders recently signed by El Presidente wherein he gets to be dictator of everything in the event of "national emergency," which he also reserves to himself to define.

At one point in the discussion Brian Lamb asked the most pertinent question: Wonder what Bush thinks is about to happen that he would take such extraordinary steps? What are they getting ready for? Or more importantly, what steps are they prepared to take to "protect" us?

The mainstream press has hardly noticed these executive orders. It made page 13 in the Washington Post.

Corsi's article, however, is generating interest, particularly on right-wing talk radio. Corsi, in case you've forgotten, is a conservative activist who co-authored the hatchet job on John Kerry, "Unfit for Command," and was deeply involved with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. No liberal bleeding heart, he!

And WorldNetDaily is itself a conservative organ funded in part by Richard Mellon Scaife.

Can we take some heart from conservatives like Corsi and WND (and Ron Paul) that even they are alarmed by the megalomania of this bantam president and his handlers?