The once-a-fortnight blog continues...

With this gem from the Daily Kos, quoting Bill Maher:

"Rush [Limbaugh] and his ilk have come up with a name for the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court that's been 99 percent white men for 200 years, and that name is 'reverse racist.' She is a racist and someone has to stop her because for too long white men have been kept down by powerful Puerto Rican women!"
---Bill Maher

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Back here in the Greatland, Anchorage Daily News columnist Elise Patkotak combines the Religious Right's mis-belief that America's laws are somehow based on the Ten Commandments - and their fear of gay marriage. Demonstrating that only two commandments of the "Decalogue" are actually in law (#6, "Thou shalt not kill," and #8, Thou shalt not steal). Further, Elise reminds us that all known cultures and civilizations since humans became human have embraced those very two concepts, regardless of religion. How else could any culture survive?

She adds that:
"If your religion requires you to shun gay people, shun away. But your god cannot take away their civil liberties because the Constitution make it crystal clear that those rights and liberties did not come from any god." I particularly like the way she boldly uses the lower case "god." It shows that Elise is not afraid to demand that religious people need to succeed in what Oliver Wendel Holmes referred to as the "market place of ideas," and cannot expect the rest of us to defer to religious views only because their religious.

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New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner in economics Paul Krugman puts the current financial crisis' roots squarely where they belong. In the administration of Ronald Reagan, hero of the Republican Party, who signed the law that gave the banking industry"a license to gamble with the taxpayers money" due to the catastrophic long-term effects of deregulation. Go to the NYT website and find it.

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Finally, it looks like two petty crooks (bribery) who were once representatives in the Alaska State Legislature may actually get out - part of the fallout from the US Senator Ted Steven's(R-Alaska) affair, where the USDOJ (under Obama) dropped all seven charges to which Uncle Ted was convicted (under Bush). This was due to mishandling of Steven's case by prosecutors, NOT on the evidence. Ted's age (82) was also a factor in Attorney General Holder's decision to not retry.

Not quite so lucky are former state reps. Pete Kott and Vic Kohring, as even though they may be released temporarily, their convictions may still hold up. After all their was indisputable video evidence of the bribes-for-votes for both of these guys. Hell, Vic (my own former representative) went down for like, 200 bucks and a bottle of vodka. Stay tuned on this one.