I don’t shrink from the word “liberal” one bit. Unlike cowards like Kerry and Gore, I am proud to be a liberal and think the liberal agenda is widely misunderstood and has deep roots in the values that we share as Americans. These values include personal liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to congregate and many, many more. Democracy is the child of liberal values. America, the country, attained our independence because of an amazing group of individuals who were not willing to accept the status quo. Liberals (not Democrats, necessarily) have always fought for equality and democracy, from the civil war to civil rights.

That’s why I am proud that George Clooney, unlike so many Hollywood cowards, has come out. In his article I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! Clooney states the obvious that has somehow remained hidden in the last 6 years of the Republican police state. Dissent is patriotic. The Right Wing should be ashamed of themselves for constantly characterizing liberals as traitors. How is it that a party that claims they want less government can actively lobby against civil liberties? They actively lobby to put the police in your bedroom?

Republicans are just liberals who haven’t seen the light yet.

The Star Tribune is reporting on a new bill here in Minnesota that would allow pharmacists to “reject prescriptions on moral grounds”.

Can you guess my opinion on this one? I think this is so fucking lame. I have the perfect solution for this. If you are a pharmacist and you don’t want to dispense the prescriptions that doctors issue quit your fucking job! You are not qualified! Your job is not to impose your morals on your customers, it is to dispense the medication that a medical doctor has prescribed, period. If you don’t like it, do us all a favor and go join the clergy somewhere.

Allowing pharmacists to decide which drugs they feel morally willing to dispense is super fucking stupid and is just one more lame tactic in the war against women.

(If you haven’t already, please read the preceding post titled Abortion and the Right to Privacy. It’s long but it moves quick.)

Mark is arguing that even if you want abortion to be legal, implementing it by attacking the right to privacy hurts you. It hurts all of us and it hurts the Right by breaking one of their prime ideals — no more government than necessary. Mind you: I’m not talking about abortion. I’m talking about the other rights, as Mark outlines, that we lose in the deal. The right to privacy is fundamentally a limit on what government can impose on us. It’s a good thing and Republicans want it to. They are just so fixated on abortion that they are willing to give up anything to get it criminalized.

Listen up, you pro-Lifers, let’s keep fighting but you have to find a better tactic than attacking the right to privacy. You want privacy, too. It’s the wrong place to fight abortion.

This is by my friend, lawyer Mark Sondreal.

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Is there a right to privacy guaranteed by our constitution? This is a question that has come up again lately, largely due to President Bush’s Supreme Court nominations and the recent South Dakota law effectively banning abortion in that state. The reason the answer to this question is important is because the right to privacy forms the basis for the Court’s decision in Roe and the cases preceding that decision.

In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court expanded on a string of prior decisions which found a right to privacy emanating from the protections afforded by the 4th and 5th amendments. The right of a woman to have an abortion stems from the privacy right to do as she wishes with her body. By the way, abortion is not the only privacy right the Court has found to be protected by the “Constitutionally implied right to privacy”. The right to make choices regarding contraception is based on the right to privacy as is the right of consenting adults to marry outside of their own race and the right of married persons to make love in the way they see fit.

The anti-abortion folks often take the position that the Roe vs Wade decision is fundamentally flawed because there is no right to privacy specifically enumerated in the constitution. They are right. The right to privacy has been implied by the Court in light of other enumerated rights and protections. The Supreme Court has taken the position that to hold that a right to privacy is not constitutionally protected would be inconsistent with the rights and protections that are specifically guaranteed in the 4th and 5th amendments. (self incrimination and unreasonable search and seizure)

Now, I can understand that abortion is a very contentious and emotional issue to many people. That said, I think that undermining the right to privacy established by existing legal precedent as a means of outlawing abortion is misguided. I have to assume that people who advocate for that position have not fully considered the implications. I seriously doubt that any rational person wants the state or federal government to have the right to make laws dictating what they can or can’t do in their bedroom. For those of you that still hold to the argument that the constitution should be interpreted literally, following is a partial list of other rights not mentioned in the constitution but still guaranteed by our courts:

1. The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty
2. The right to vote
3. The right to travel
4. The right to a jury “of your peers”
5. The right to get married
6. The right to have children
7. The separation of church and state

If we follow the logic of the anti-abortion crew, these rights have also been “invented” by the “activist judiciary” and should not be constitutionally protected. I think anyone who believes this approach is acceptable is simply not looking at the whole picture. Think about it. Do you want to give the government more control over individual behavior or less? Personally, and with very few exceptions, I will argue for less control every time. The point I’m trying to make is that just because a right is not specifically mentioned in the constitution does not mean it should not be protected by the constitution.

Contrary to the assertions of many religious political conservatives of this country, judicial interpretation of the constitution is not a bad thing for the Supreme Court to engage in, in fact, it’s their job. To the extent that the Court interprets the constitution to provide us with more freedom and protection from governmental intervention in our private lives, such interpretations should be applauded.

For those individuals who sincerely feel that abortion is wrong, I whole-heartedly support your right to protest and air your views publicly in an effort to garner support for your position. However, I don’t support your efforts to attain your goal by advocating for a constitutional interpretation which will likely have the effect of limiting privacy rights far beyond the scope of abortion. I am not asking that you change your moral position on abortion. I am simply asking that you re-examine the implications of the means by which you are attempting to achieve your goal.

To sum up….the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed to us in the constitution. Neither are a number of other rights. The protection of these rights stems from either a long history of judge-made common law or from judicial interpretation of the constitution. This is not a bad thing. People who are trying to ban abortion by curtailing the right to privacy are hurting everyone, including themselves. Try to keep in mind that the constitution is not so much about what we can do as individuals as it is about what our government can do to us. The more power we give the government to legislate our behavior, the less freedom we have. A constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy provides us all with protection against unjustified and unwanted governmental intervention in our personal lives. Just think about it.

We should be able to separate the speech we make as individuals with our jobs at work. That is to say, as individuals, we should be able to engage in free speech without it effecting our employment. Specifically what I mean is, if I am a raging liberal, like myself, or a raging Republican, like some of you, it is my right to be vocal or active about my politics and I should not be subject to discrimination because of it. I’d expand this to include not just my politics but my religion, my hobbies or any other legal behavior I engage in. So if I’m gay, or a buddhist or belong to the Tax Payer’s League, I should be free to live my life.

Now if someone blogs about how their boss is stupid and the company they work for sucks and such, they need to know that what they are saying will be heard as if said, in person, to the boss. Word gets around, people Google and poof, a little rant on your blog is being discussed by the boss. So that’s just stupid.

But other examples are not. Being gay, for example, or an atheist or even, perhaps, a born again Christian. Being interested in Harleys or stamps or group sex should not be things, even if discoverable on the Internet, that influence your employment.

Yes, there are grey lines here. If an employee agrees to some code of conduct prior to accepting a job, an employer can reasonably expect them to uphold it. In most cases, there is no such pre-agreement.

As someone who is very opinionated, I expect some potential clients for my company may Google me and disagree with me when they find this site. That’s fine. If they choose not to work with us because of my views, they are idiots. I can easily separate my work from my life and I would never not work with a company because I disagreed with an individual’s politics or views.

I hope you agree.

My personalized Google home page shared this Thomas Jefferson quote with me today:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

This hits the nail on the head in regards to how wrong the Right can be. They see the inconveniences of “too much liberty” and they seek to minimize them by taking away our liberties. There are many examples but to use a dumb one: flag burning. I’d rather live in a society where freedom of expression includes rather idiotic acts such as burning a flag than live in a society with less liberty where you can be arrested and jailed for such behavior. The inconvenience of watching someone disrespect our national flag is, to me, more tolerable than the inconvenience of jailing people for expressing ideas, even unpopular or idiotic ones.

To me, this is self-evident.

The same is true for this torture debate. I’ve heard that Bush may veto the McCain bill which would ban torture as a tactic of our government or armed forces

I can handle the inconveniences of living in a world where bad people do bad things. I can’t handle living in a world where supposedly good people do bad things. That we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the bad guys is something we should be proud of, even though it does create inconveniences. We shouldn’t even be debating torture — it should be so fucking obvious that we could never condone such tactics.

Let me point out, too, whenever our service men and women are captured by the enemy we go on and on about how they better not be tortured and the Geneva convention should be applied, etc. I agree with this. Why on earth do we think this shouldn’t be the case when we capture foreign nationals? Double-standards don’t work.

The Republican party is in many ways the party of anti-liberty, as evidenced by their hatred of the ACLU, an organization whose sole mission is to protect our liberties.

Jefferson was right, the Right is wrong (again).

Just wanted to point out a comment I made on Shelly the Republican’s site. Shelly is whining about how Democrats are dividing the country by pointing out that the federal response to Katrina was an embarrassing and deadly fuckup. It’s the double-standard that bugs me — the Right “divided the country” every fucking day for 8 years under Clinton. Anyway, she finishes with some Bush ass-kissing and then with the statement: Meanwhile, this takes our eye off the real enemy–the Muslims.

My comment is:

It still just stuns me that you are willing to call ALL MUSLIMS the enemy. That is factually incorrect. There are Muslims in our armed forces helping fight this war that you believe is going so very well. As I mentioned before, are we at war with Protestants because of Timothy McVeigh? It is the actions of terrorists that make them terrorists, not their religious beliefs. Agreed?

Michael Koppelman
http://www.lolife.com/

It is an unwinnable war, of course, if our enemy is all Muslims. It’s an unwinnable war even now, where the net number of “terrorists” is increasing every day. The real solution is a bitter pill for the Right: a foreign policy in the Mid East that is fair and rational.

Look — I have no sympathy for actual terrorists. The problem is, we are starting to define “terrorist” as those that oppose the US. That is not a valid definition. I oppose the US viewpoint on many issues. I am not a terrorist. We are allowing the right to define the enemy as anyone who opposes us and that is a foreign policy that is guaranteed to fail.

As Unscrewing the Inscrutable points out, people of faith apparently feel they are under attack by secularists. As if people of faith are persecuted for their beliefs. What a bunch of utter crap. Says California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown

“These are perilous times for people of faith,” she said, “not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

Ms. Brown is confused. Religious people can and do say whatever the fuck they want whenever and wherever they want. I will fight and die for their right to do so. The real war here is people like Ms. Brown who think that people who insist on the separation of church and state are a threat to religious people. We are not. In fact, secularists are a group made up largely of religious people!

Secularists have no problem with people of faith. The people we have a problem with are those that would inject their faith into our government. Judge Brown clearly confuses her personal faith with her duties as a judge and for that, the Democrats are completely correct to oppose her nomination to the federal judiciary.

As if Rick Santorum hadn’t proved himself enough of an idiot already, now he wants to ban the National Weather Service from distributing the weather!. It is hard to believe how ridiculous this is. I don’t actually give a rats ass weather what AccuWeather wants or doesn’t want. It goes without saying that the National Weather Service is important and that because our tax dollars pay for their work, the general public should have access to it. Fuckin duh.

Santorum is clearly, obviously and blatantly siding with a small special interest group rather than with the people that elected him. I wish the people of Pennsylvania would fire that dumb fuck.

Our brain dead members of the House voted to eliminate the estate tax. This is dumb. Really dumb. First of all, the estate tax effects a very, very, very slim minority of people. Second of all, the farmers and small business owners that the Republicans claim this is helping can easily be helped by raising the threshold a bit. Right now it is at $1.5M. Make it $5M and it covers all of those poster child cases. Hell, make it $10M.

The people most “hurt” by the estate tax are the ultra wealthy, i.e. those people with generational wealth who inherited their fortune and want every child and grandchild and descendent to be wealthy until the end of time. First of all, I personally think generational wealth is bad for America. The rich love to talk about a meritocracy. If they truly believe that they should be for an ungodly high estate tax rate, because people that inherit money did not earn it. There is no “merit” there. Second, if you inherit millions or billions of dollars, it is a no brainer that you can make it into even more millions and billions. In terms of equal opportunity in this country, no question people that inherit ungodly fortunes have a huge advantage.

Make no question about it — the estate tax still leaves plenty of room for rich cry babies to remain rich cry babies. If you are worth a shit load of money when you die, your children will still have a shit load of money. What we are saying with the estate tax is that your wealth was not created in a vacuum and you have a responsibility to share some portion of your wealth with the country that made it possible after you are dead and don’t need it anymore.

As a side note, people that leave huge fortunes to their children are idiots anyway. I can’t think of a more efficient way to turn people into white trash than give them millions of dollars for no reason. As Warren Buffet says, you should leave your kids enough money that they feel they can do anything but not so much they can do nothing.

The estate tax is fair, it effects very few people, it helps support the very society that makes extreme wealth possible, it is consistent with a philosophy of a meritocracy, it can be tweaked to protect farmers and small business owners, and we absolutely need it.

Why the hell are Republicans so stupid that even in times of war and soaring debt they still want to eliminate taxes? These people are fiscally irresponsible.