sunday mornin' go to meetin' roundup

i have been asked if i wanted to attend the home show at the convention center with mi nuera (my daughter-in-law)... ok, sure, i said... ~rolls eyes~ nothing like a public celebration of conspicuous consumption to honor the day of rest... ah, well...

but b4 i go, there's some interesting bits out there... here's a few and the best, of course, is saved for last...

(from the washington post)

The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy [...], affiliated with Andrew Young, the Democratic former mayor of Atlanta, ranked 14 congressional votes of interest to those earning between $25,000 and $100,000. It reports that the average "middle class score" dropped from 61 to 43 percent in the House in 2003, and from 76 to 52 percent in the Senate in 2003.

if you're just watchin' what's goin' on, no suprise there...

(from the washington post)

The Gun Owners of America, a Second Amendment group even more hard-line than the National Rifle Association, is reminding its members that the filibuster has been used in the past to block a ban on semiautomatic guns, .50-caliber weapons, a ban on gun-show sales, and a trigger-lock mandate.

gun-owners against the filibuster...? who would have thunk it...?

(from the nyt)

The Bush administration is developing a plan to give the government access to possibly hundreds of millions of international banking records in an effort to trace and deter terrorist financing... [This] would vastly expand the government's database of financial transactions by gaining access to logs of international wire transfers into and out of American banks.

and grant easier access to those who send money OUT of the country to offshore banks in order to avoid taxes...?

(from the washington post)

Allies and friends of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) have concluded that public attention to his ethics is unlikely to abate for months to come, and they plan to try to preserve his power by launching an aggressive media strategy and calling in favors from prominent conservative leaders, according to Republicans participating in the strategy sessions.

The Republicans said the strategy combines leaks from DeLay allies about questionable Democratic trips and financial matters; denunciations of unfavorable news stories as biased, orchestrated rehashes; and swift, organized responses to journalists' inquiries.

unless my suspicion that rove considers delay too much of a liability and is the one actually behind the recent spate of revelations, the "saving the hammer" campaign is tailor-made for rove's department of dirty tricks... never mind that the last one (claiming the "talking point" memo was a democratic forgery) backfired... just you watch... my money says a swift boat veterans-style attack is imminent...

(from the nyt)

Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now.

[...]

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

[...]

Our leaders are not only to the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine). They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of "Revelations," to the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere. This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution, John Paul in 1996 officially declared that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."

[...]

We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade.

frank rich, you're spot on... and i hope today's appearance on the op-ed page means you're back there full-time... you are a pretty damn good arts critic but your range is so much broader than that...

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