Libertarian blogger Dan Riehl on the liberal response to Wesley Snipes’ tax conviction: “In relative terms, there will be little or no liberal hand-wringing over the Snipes conviction, which causes one to wonder if they really understand freedom at all. Snipes appears to be guilty, but he WAS striking Big Brother at its heart in a way few if any anti-war protesters ever do …Issues like the above are why I genuinely question the motivations of liberals today. They claim to be championing liberty. Yet nearly everything they champion calls for more taxation and regulation. One can’t do both and be intellectually consistent, or honest.”

Possibly this is too complicated for Riehl to grasp, but Snipes wasn’t thrown in jail for leading a peaceful protest against income tax or trying to reform the tax system, he was thrown in jail for not paying it. Since I do think taxes should be paid (though like most people, including Riehl, I have strong opinions on who should be taxed, how they should be taxed, what should be taxed, etc.), I can’t say this shakes me to the core of my liberal soul.

In fairness, reading some of Riehl’s other posts about torture (which he seems to rank much less important in terms of liberty than tax evasion) and Islam, I suspect he’s of the right-wing persuasion that thinks “libertarian” makes him stand out.

Moving somewhat higher on the right-wing food chain, we have George Will on teachers: “After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.”

I know Will’s supposed to be very, very, very smart, but does have the slightest idea how crappy teacher pay used to be? So help me, every time in my memory that teachers have asked for better pay or benefits, the cry goes up “My god! If they want to be paid well, they can’t possibly care about the kids! They’re supposed to be in this for love, not money!”

Teachers are, apparently, wonderful noble beings until anyone asks they get paid what they deserve.

That’s it for me. I’ll post again May 5, unless I put something up while on vacation.

Anyone remember this Heart song from the late 80s/early 90s? A woman picks up a stranger, has one magical night of love, then leaves? Then he finds out later she seduced him because her husband is sterile and she wanted a child.
I was listening to it on the radio just now and I think it’s the first time I’ve heard her parting words clearly:
“I am the flower
You are the seed
We walked in a garden
And planted a tree.”

I realize it’s metaphorical, but that makes no sense whatsoever.

Columnist Ron Hart: “Hillary is trying to win this election as only a Clinton knows how: by targeting a group of simple-minded poor whites and scaring the bejeezus out of them that her black male rival intends to take away their gun.”

Who knew Hart could be so funny? “As only a Clinton knows how”—given how often Republicans have played the Scary Black Male Card (both in this election—as I’ve blogged about previously—and others) and made guns an issue, that’s positively hysterical.

You may know that the Supreme Court recently ruled that a Goodyear employee, Lily Ledbetter, couldn’t sue her employer for paying her less than men doing the same work, because she didn’t find out until after 20 years with the company (apparently Goodyear, like a lot of corporations, doesn’t encourage people to discuss salaries). The court’s ruling was that based on current law, she had six months after the disparate pay started to file a suit, regardless of when she learned about it.

Congress is now looking at a bill to change the law. Sen. McCain, who skipped a vote on it, said that of course he supports equal pay but “this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.”

Some support. Apparently someone such as Ledbetter suing because she’s been discriminated against is worse than the actual discrimination in McCain’s view. How does he think these cases should be handled then? Have Ledbetter stare at her boss with sad puppydog eyes?

If McCain is the kind of elitist who thinks it should be legal to discriminate based on gender, fine, but spare me the crap about how he really, really supports equal rights.

Excerpts from a Q&A earlier this week:
Q: This story was made public by ABC a few weeks ago. It claims that you, Rice, Tenet and others met in the White House to discuss different methods of “enhanced interrogation,” is that correct?
Ashcroft: “Correct? Is what correct? Is it correct that this story ran on ABC? I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about it! Is it a real story? When was this story, huh? Huh?”
… Q: “The article says that you discussed “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning”…
Ashcroft: “I said next question!”
…

ME: First off, Mr. Ashcroft, I’d like to apologize for the rudeness of some of my fellow students. It was uncalled for–we can disagree civilly, we don’t need that. (round of applause from the audience, and Ashcroft smiles) I have here in my hand two documents. One of them, you know, is the text of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which, point of interest, says nothing about “lasting physical damage”…
Q: “This other document is a section from the judgment of the Tokyo War Tribunal. After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan. Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. And among the tortures listed was the “water treatment,” which we nowadays call waterboarding…”
Ashcroft: “This is a speech, not a question. I don’t mind, but it’s not a question.”
Q: I”t will be, sir, just give me a moment. The judgment describes this water treatment, and I quote, “the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach.” One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information. Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country–exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do–do you believe that his sentence was unjust?”
Ashcroft: “Now, listen here. You’re comparing apples and oranges, apples and oranges. We don’t do anything like what you described.”
Q: “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we still use the method of putting a cloth over someone’s face and pouring water down their throat…”
Ashcroft: “Pouring! Pouring! Did you hear what she said? “Putting a cloth over someone’s face and pouring water on them.” That’s not what you said before! Read that again, what you said before!”
…
Q: “The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach.”
Ashcroft: :You hear that? You hear it? “Forced!” If you can’t tell the difference between forcing and pouring…does this college have an anatomy class? If you can’t tell the difference between forcing and pouring…”
Q: “Mr. Ashcroft, do you believe that Yukio Asano’s sentence was unjust? Answer the question.”
Ashcroft: “It’s not a fair question; there’s no comparison. Next question!”

Lisa Schiffren on the National Review Web site, regarding a photo of Julie Nixon Eisenhower contributing to the Obama campaign: “given the linked picture, perhaps the fact that she looks like a carbon copy of her mother — a bit mad, but with a little more iron about the jaw — suggests that she is not her father’s daughter after all. The picture is more shocking than the deed.”

Is Schiffren suggesting that Eisenhower doesn’t follow her father’s politics? If that’s all it is, what does her mother’s picture have to do with it (because politics, astonishingly, isn’t something that’s passed down genetically with the bone structure).

Is she implying that Eisenhower is literally not Nixon’s daughter? In which case does she think Pat Nixon cheated on Dick or simply cloned herself?

And what’s so shocking about supporting Obama over McCain?

I see that in yesterday’s Daily News, someone thought he had a conclusive argument in favor of the right to keep guns in our cars on other people’s property: Even if they ban guns, people can still bring in baseball bats and knives!

This is an old, silly argument by the NRA and similar gun-worshippers: If government takes away the guns, people will just find other weapons.

Quite possibly true. But there’s a reason we hear about the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine shooting and not the Virginia Tech knifing or the Colubmine clubbing—the chance someone with a blade or a blunt instrument could go on that kind of killing spree without a gun and not get brought down is well, nil.

If knives and clubs were as effective as these gun-nuts seem to think, then all we’d have to do is walk around carrying a baseball bat and we’d be able to defend ourselves from crazies like the Virginia Tech guy. But the pro-gun forces all insist that without guns we’d be helpless—doesn’t it occur to them that cuts both ways?

Pazevic: “It was the poorest showing in the years I have been cleaning the beach.” And almost all of them were from out of town, not locals.

It just registered how much the audience in the room has thinned out over the past hour or so.