CNN International: “Sanford spending holiday weekend with family in Florida”

The poor dear. If he weren’t such a policy hypocrite on marriage, I’d give him a break.

If the reports are true and Sarah Palin is set to resign as Governor of Alaska, then surely she cannot be in the running any longer for a 2012 Republican Party presidential spot. If her level of experience was unsatisfying to the nation’s voters, six more months of time in office (mostly spent on the national speakers circuit) won’t change that. Unless Palin pulls a Perot and changes her mind before actually resigning, she’ll have nothing new to bone up her scanty resume for the presidency… unless you count a tourist trip to Little Diomede Island to go look at Russia.

Palin’s reason for resignation — that she has tired of the “political blood sport” of being Governor of Alaska and had tired of the critical attention focused upon her — leads me to wonder: if the McCain-Palin ticket of 2008 had won election, how long would she have wanted to stick around in Washington, DC?

Really. Which is worse: that Maine Republican candidate for Governor Les Otten has pretty obviously copied President Barack Obama’s website theme…

… or that President Barack Obama has pretty obviously copied from the Republican Party platform on warrantless surveillance, state secrets, torture, the imbalance of power and anti-gay discrimination?

November 2003: Massachusetts Supreme Court declares the validity of same-sex marriage. Without noticing, Senator John Ensign stops telling his wife she looks pretty in the morning.

February 2004: San Francisco begins to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Senator Ensign asks a staffer on a date. She demurs. After declaring his opposition to same-sex marriage, Ensign loses interest in other women and begins sending his wife flowers every week.

May 2004: Same-sex marriages begin in Massachusetts. The flowers stop.

August 2004: California Supreme Court rules same-sex marriages in San Francisco are invalid. More flowers for Mrs. Ensign, plus a weekend trip together to Majorca.

2005: Smooches.

June 2006: John Ensign votes for Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Regular smooching escalates to heavy petting and a renewal of vows with Mrs. Ensign.

June 2007: Massachusetts legislature prevents a gay marriage ban from being placed on the ballot. Senator and Mrs. Ensign begin to squabble over finances and the kids.

August 2007: Iowa judge rules that Polk County must allow same-sex marriage licenses to be issued. John Ensign begins sleeping on the couch and spends more evenings at the office.

September 2007: Maryland Supreme Court rules that same-sex couples have the right to marry. Senator Ensign tells his wife that he is the new Chairman of the nonexistent Select Committee on Philately; supposedly attending “markup meetings,” Ensign begins to date campaign staffer.

April 2008: Concerned Women of America mounts a rally against gay marriage in Oklahoma City. Senator Ensign tells his mistress he can’t keep living a lie. She runs from his arms with tears in her eyes. John Ensign tells his wife the Philately Committee has been disbanded.

May 2008: California Supreme Court declares same-sex marriage to be legal and valid. Senator Ensign and his mistress passionately reunite after he tells Mrs. Ensign he’s going on an extended Delta-region fact-finding mission.

June 2008: Same-sex marriages in California begin. Senator Ensign and his mistress welcome a dog and a flock of ducks to their bachannals.

August 2008: A hiatus in extramarital sex. (No sex after Labor Day in Nevada)

May 2009: Blackmail

June 2009: Contrition

Newt Gingrich for President and John Ensign for Vice President in 2012: it’s the choice ticket, a perfect representation of Republican moral values in statement and in practice.

There’s synergy in the pairing: I mean, they could cheat on each other’s wives with each other’s wives! It would save them time that they could otherwise spend explaining to us how the rest of America’s marriages should be arranged. How handy for them.

“I wouldn’t put myself hopefully in that kind of position, but if I was in a position like that, that’s what I would do.” — Senator John Ensign, August 30 2007, considering whether Senator Larry Craig should resign for having extramarital sex.

“I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it’s because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through.” — Senator John Ensign, September 27 2007, calling on President Bill Clinton to resign for having had extramarital sex.

“I am committed to my service in the United States Senate, and my work on behalf of the people of Nevada. I will not be taking any questions.” — Senator John Ensign, June 16 2009, explaining why he will not resign after admitting an extended affair of extramarital sex from December 2007 to August 2008.

“If Americans are paying attention, unfortunately, our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of our countries had in mind for us.”

– Sarah Palin, Monday June 8, 2009

Remember back in the fall of 2008, how the handlers of Sarah Palin groped about desperately, trying to find evidence of any accomplishment of hers in office? Republican front operations like “CNSNews” thought they had a good “accomplishment” to talk about: the natural gas pipeline deal that Sarah Palin brought to completion:

Palin Finalized 20-Year Quest for Pipeline Deal in First 20 Months

In her first 20 months as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin completed a deal for a natural gas pipeline that had been a top economic goal for the state for nearly two decades….

“When that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence,” said Palin during her speech. “That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.”…

A contract for the pipeline, which had been discussed for the last 20 years, was finally negotiated after Palin became Alaska’s governor in 2007.

In 2009, has it been built? No. Has building started on the pipeline? How about arrangements? Those were supposed to be finalized, right?

Um, no. Sarah Palin flew down to Texas this week, still working on possible potential, hypothetical arrangements on that pipeline she said she got done but which does not, not in the smallest bolt, exist.

In other news, did I tell you that I’ve built the world’s tallest building from a foundation in the midst of Okefenokee Swamp? It’s my greatest accomplishment. As soon as I get some agreements from a few potential partners, I look forward to receiving my Nobel Prize in Engineering.

It’s a funny thing how Republicans deal with the idea of states’ rights. On issues like abortion, they’ll say that they favor states’ rights. But on other issues, they actually work against the right of state governments to determine how to run their own affairs.

Today, all but one of the Republicans of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, joined by four Democrats on the committee, including Chairman Jeff Bingaman, voted to add an amendment to an energy bill that legalizes offshore drilling within 45 miles of the Gulf Coast of Florida. The Florida State legislature has already passed a law that outlaws drilling for oil in Gulf of Mexico closer than 125 miles from shore.

Florida’s economy gets a huge amount of income from activities related to its beaches, and doesn’t want them ruined by oil slicks turning white sands into asphalt. Yet, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate think they know what’s better for Florida than Floridians do. Their states’ rights political philosophy got thrown out the window today, in favor of oil corporations’ drilling rights.

John Stracke makes an excellent point in the Diaries: Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas makes a big deal about restricting women’s right to end a pregnancy; even well before an embryo has any cognition or heart beat, Sessions has voted for “equal protection” legislation that would make aborting such an embryo legally tantamount to murder. And yet Rep. Sessions has been unwilling to vote for legislation that would give federal employees a mere four weeks to spend with their newly born babies.

Stracke writes:

Yesterday the House voted to grant federal employees four weeks of paid parental leave. If it becomes law, that means a baby born to one or more federal employees will have four weeks of extra attention, four weeks when their parent(s) will be able to get up in the night without worrying about being a wreck at work in the morning, four weeks of bonding, maybe four weeks of breastfeeding…. he favors creating unwanted babies, but he’s unwilling to spend a few dollars to help them grow up sane and healthy.

There are circumstances in which the rights of Americans come into conflict with one another, and when that happens people will tend to differ on the priority of one right over another. Take property rights and freedom of expression, for instance. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees Americans’ freedom of speech. But that right has been taken to exist mainly in the public arena; when a person purchases server space and a domain name, they are said to own a website and have a right to moderate the comments of others there. Newspaper owners have the right to accept or decline letters to the editor. Moving away from written media, you aren’t free to budge into your neighbor’s bathroom and hold forth for hours about the relative merits of American League versus National League baseball teams. Your neighbor’s ownership of her home and her bathroom grant her control over what is said and done there. Her property rights trump your speech rights, and if you don’t like it, you’ll have to take your whining about out of her bathroom and back over to your porch where it belongs.

Matters become more complicated when the nature of ownership is blurred and expression moves from words to actions. What if your neighbor rents? Could the actual owner of her bungalow include a provision in the property lease that allows you to at least enter her living room on demand and quote baseball statistics? Could the property owner require tenants to refrain from holding political meetings in the homes tenants rent? Could the property owner ban the placement of political campaign signs in the yard?

What if a property owner prohibited tenants of a property from flying a flag from the home? What if a homeowner association, which has control over the covenants home buyers sign, dictates that home owners in a development cannot fly a flag from their home? Such cases have arisen in the United States, and in those cases property rights conflict directly with freedom of expression — particularly, the freedom to express oneself by flying a flag. Back in 2005, both the House and the Senate passed H.R. 42, the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act, without a single recorded vote in opposition. Republicans and Democrats alike took to the floor in our nation’s Capitol to extol the virtues of free speech in the promotion of patriotism, and to condemn the dastardliness of property owners or homeowners’ or condominium association boards who attempted to prevent residents from displaying American flags. President George W. Bush signed the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act into law. Action on this bill by Republicans and Democrats alike clearly prioritized the right to place a flag on a property over the right of property owners to dictate how their property is used.

On May 28, 2009, the Maine House passed LD 73, An Act To Protect the Right To Use Solar Energy. LD 73 would make it illegal for deeds, covenants or any other contracts (presumably including leases) to prohibit the erection and use of clotheslines to dry clothes using the clean, renewable energy of the sun. The breakdown of this vote was 76 in favor and 65 against. Every Republican member of the Maine House but one was either not present for the vote or voted against the bill.

When it comes to putting up a flag, Republican legislators are gung-ho about putting property rights on the back burner and supporting the right of residents to do what they wish. When it comes to putting up a clothesline, Republican legislators suddenly are very much interested in property rights and rather uninterested in the right of residents to do what they wish. That’s interesting.

When it comes to attacks on the Constitution, Ron Paul is all about the money this year. For the 2008 election, he tried triangulating with libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats by criticizing the abuses of civil liberties under George W. Bush. That didn’t work out for him so well.

So, Congressman Paul has turned back to Texas politics. For his 2010 re-election campaign, in which he faces a tough Republican primary battle against Jeff Cherry. So, Paul is working to appeal to a purely Republican base now, libertarian and non-libertarian alike.

Ron Paul is no longer criticizing unconstitutional civil rights abuses, though many of those are continuing under Barack Obama, and others are being justified and defended by Congress. He’s fallen silent on those issues, silently accepting attacks against constitutional rights when they come to human rights. Those are, after all, not big campaign issues in Ron Paul’s home district in Texas.

Instead, Ron Paul has embraced whole hog the Republican anti-Socialist crusade of 2009. Representative Paul is aiming for Republican votes to help him fend off Jeff Cherry by resorting to the most base aspect of libertarian politics: The screech that Big Government is taking your money.

(Like most libertarians, Ron Paul never mentions the part about government giving you back your services and your infrastructure in return for that money.)

This year, Ron Paul is leaving higher ideals, and just promising to help people to keep a tight grip on what’s theirs. Thus, Ron Paul’s signature campaign is to audit the Federal Reserve, and then destroy it. That sounds ridiculous, and it is, but this is what Ron Paul himself proposes, in his own words: “Audit the Fed, Then End It!”

To support Ron Paul’s anti-Fed campaign, Paul’s supporters are selling the Audit the Fed tshirt you see here.

It seems like a populist message, on the face of it, and I have some sympathy for the motivation of people who want to give more scrutiny to the various forms of the government’s financial bailouts. There’s been waste. There’s been corruption. There’s been backward thinking…

… in the Federal Reserve, yes, but what I’m talking about is in the production of that Ron Paul tshirt. In order to understand the full implications of Ron Paul’s new money-only libertarianism, we need to consider where Paul’s Audit the Fed t-shirt comes from.

That tshirt is sold through Zazzle. Zazzle sells many kinds of tshirts. Some of them are made ethically, here in the USA. Others, on the other hand, are made in overseas sweatshops using outsourced labor where workers and their communities are abused. Often, in these outsourced garment contractors’ operations, people are paid a pittance, exposed to dangerous working conditions, and the surrounding area is contaminated with toxins. Money from the enterprise is often siphoned off to support autocratic governments or whatever corrupt warlord controls the area.

In order to support Ron Paul’s crusade against the Federal Reserve, Paul’s supporters are selling the Zazzle tshirts that are made by contractors with a history of sweatshop conditions. The shirt sold on RonPaul.com is not one made in the USA under ethical conditions.

That Ron Paul’s supporters are selling such products, made in questionable circumstances, says a lot about the discrepancy between what libertarianism promises and what it would actually deliver. Libertarian politicians like Ron Paul say that their anti-regulation, free-for-all policies would benefit average working people, but the truth is that those policies would strip away the protections that give working people a fair shake.

Here in the USA, it’s government regulations that prevent American workers from having to work in sweatshops, and provide at least some minimal protection to communities from toxic industrial wastes. The free market solutions Ron Paul is pushing don’t provide those protections. The free market doesn’t respect the rights of the average individual. Ron Paul’s libertarianism would take the sweatshop conditions in which RonPaul.com tshirts are made overseas, and recreate them right here in the USA.

I’m not supporting Jeff Cherry’s campaign. Cherry is as rotten as Ron Paul, only in a traditional Republican way.

My concern is to warn people who have supported Ron Paul, to begin to cast a critical eye at the reality behind the libertarian utopian promises. Look at what libertarians actually do. Look at their economic relationships with the companies that provide products and services to support Ron Paul. What you’ll find is that, underneath the populist veneer, there’s a current of economic exploitation.

Yesterday, I noted how Democrats in Congress have been silent on the issue of President Obama’s decision to resurrect George W. Bush’s military tribunal kangaroo courts - show trials with substandard procedures designed to prejudge guilt and lead to conviction. Democratic members of the House and Senate seem more interested in having their political team keep a grip on power than they are in using their power to fulfill their oaths to defend the Constitution.

But, let’s be fair. It’s not just the Democrats who are turning a blind eye to the injustice of this separate-and-unequal set of military courts. The Republicans are silent refusing to speak out against the courts too. It was the Republicans, after all, who invented these military tribunals in the first place, and they seem determined to never admit that they were wrong.

Even supposedly libertarian Republicans in Congress, like Ron Paul, are refusing to come to the defense of the Constitution and its guarantees of fair and speedy trials by a jury of peers. Representative Paul may claim to believe in “Texas straight talk”, but these days, he is too busy blathering on about his plans to abolish the Federal Reserve to speak out against Barack Obama’s attack against the core of America’s system of justice.

So, what are Republicans in Congress talking about? They’re busy tilting at the old 20th century windmill of socialism, accusing Democrats of being Socialists because the Democrats in Congress and the White House are promoting big government spending.

Congressman Paul Broun sneered yesterday, “The American people need to understand what this is all about. It’s not about cleaning up the environment. It’s about creating more revenue for the Federal Government to grow a bigger Federal Government, a bigger socialistic government.”

Representative Joe Wilson also complained about big spending by Democrats:

“President Obama last week told a town hall audience that ‘we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.’ He talked about how borrowing would lead to higher interest rates. I appreciate the President acknowledging these dangers. Unfortunately, it is his budget and his allies in Congress that will produce more debt in the next decade than all previous administrations combined. They are his policies that are borrowing too much, spending too much and taxing too much.

On the other hand, Republicans continue to offer a better way forward. Our policies would help small businesses and entrepreneurs have the capital and freedom to innovate and create jobs. At some point, the President’s actions need to match his words. American families cannot afford for President Obama to try to have it both ways.”

Trying to have it both ways? Yes, let’s talk about politicians who are trying to have it both ways. Under George W. Bush and a Republican Congress, budget deficits broke all previous records and the U.S. Federal Government grew at a more rapid pace than it ever had before. According to the Republicans’ own rhetoric, that makes the Republicans in Congress just as Socialist as the Democrats.

Of course, congressional Republicans want you to forget all about the past, and how they spent the last decade running a borrow and spend government. Perhaps the Democrats are trying to have it both ways, but the Republicans are too. At this point, I can’t say that I trust either party “to offer a better way forward”.

Effect of H.J. Res 8, a constitutional amendment introduced to the House of Representatives by Jo Ann Emerson in January: “prohibit the act of desecration of the flag of the United States.” Number of cosponsors: 2

Effect of H.J. Res 47, a constitutional amendment introduced to the House by Jo Ann Emerson in April: “prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” Number of cosponsors: 11

If Emerson removes yet another word when she reintroduces her constitutional amendment in July — like “the” or “United” — her cosponsorship count might rise to as high as 20!