What you could've said, but didn't.

So, it's amazing the number of places I live in the country. 11 different states today alone. I got my list from here, of the first eleven people from the House of Representatives to step on their metaphorical (and Weiner's pictorial) dicks.

Their latest trick, by the way, is to demand your nine-digit zip code, but that's not hard to get around. Look up a map of their Congressional district on Google (I like these, but that's just me), find a business in whatever city is completely inside that district. That gives you an address and phone number, and if you don't already have the full Zip+4, look it up.

Dear (insert Congresscritter here)

You made at least one major misstep in the last two weeks.

Would you please stop and think for a second, and ask yourself why the Republicans have managed to build up their power base for the last two decades? It's actually not hard to figure out: message discipline and solidarity. The Republicans work together.

Now, Anthony Weiner had his little scandal, and what did you do? You called on him to resign. Think about that for a second. What are you going to do if he's replaced by a Republican?

Please point out to me what laws Anthony Weiner broke. Or which women he had sex with? You can wave your hands around and say "Well, it was a distraction" all you want, but you know what? Now he's resigned. And it's still a distraction.

If he was going to resign in embarrassment, he would have done that anyway. If you needed to tell him how you felt, you could have closed the door and told him in private. Do you really think that standing in front of a microphone and telling the world how you felt did a damned thing? Really?

Anybody who might have been swayed by your declaration of "family values" (or whatever that was) wasn't going to vote for you anyway.

If you wanted to say nothing, you could have gone with something like this:

"This is a distraction. I have better things to talk about."

"Weiner did something stupid. I think his voters should be allowed to decide how they feel about it."

If you wanted to say nothing and still get some airtime for it, you could have made a slightly stronger statement, maybe something with an edge to it.

"Weiner's penis doesn't reach into my district."

"This is between him and his wife. Come back to me when Weiner commits a crime, OK?"

Or maybe you could have made a point out of the whole situation.

"I feel sorry for his wife, but I don't see what this has to do with the Republicans trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare."

"Have you asked Senator Vitter his opinion? You didn't? Well, when you do, follow it up by asking if he's embarrassed to say things like that."

"It's interesting that this comes up when the Congressman was trying to investigate the conflict of interest case of a Supreme Court justice. I also think it's interesting that you'd fall for this obvious distraction. Do you chase little toys on a string, too? Are you distracted by shiny objects?"

"Any chance we can get back to a subject that matters? No? OK, how about this? I'll worry about a sex scandal when the Republicans stop hiring hookers and paying off husbands."

Or you could even have made an entire comedy act out of it.

"Are you still on Weiner's penis? Really? Why are you so interested in another man's crotch? Are you proud of the work you're doing? When you go home at the end of the day and your wife asks 'What did you do today, dear?' do you respond with 'Well, I was all over a congressman's johnson! I reached right in there, and I groped around, but I didn't really find anything new today. Nothing juicy, anyway.' What does your editor say about this fixation of yours? Is he a supporter? 'I want more penis! We need 24-hour coverage of Anthony Weiner's crotch! This is big! Really big! I want to work this story until it explodes!' Do you have any questions about something important, or can you not think of anything today except penises?"

You know what this really would have taken on your part? A little courage. That's all. You could have stood up to the forces trying to tear apart our country, instead of turning around and attacking the people on your own side.

To put it more bluntly, Anthony Weiner showed the world that he has balls. What did you show?

Justice for the menstrual murderers!

To: Rep. John Merrill (R-Tuscaloosa)

cc: Letters to the Editor, Tuscaloosa News

Dear Representative Merrill,

Congratulations, sir! Thank you for standing up for the rights of unborn Americans everywhere. Or at least in Alabama.

Trying to amend both the legal code and the Constitution of the Great State of Alabama to define the word "person" as: "any human being from the moment of fertilization or the functional equivalent thereof" is a bold move, and would certainly make abortion illegal immediately.

I would like to point out a few difficulties that you'll be facing on the long road ahead of you, though. For one thing, the Census is certainly going to be more difficult, as all of the formerly-ignored blastocyst-Americans will need to be counted as well. And if we just rely on self-reporting, we will already be under-counting a huge number of Alabama citizens, as women aren't always immediately aware that they are pregnant.

So you'll need to think about that. Fortunately, you have just under a decade to consider the problem.

Furthermore, you will have to develop a completely new arm of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, to investigate all of the millions of new charges of murder that will have to be filed every year. After all, having declared them to be persons, they have rights, and their deaths must be investigated, right? And the mothers must at least be charged with manslaughter; that's the law.

I suppose that a mandatory pregnancy test for every post-pubescent woman is a possibility, but those tests are not extremely reliable, and a positive result would have to be verified. And all this takes us awfully close to the area of government-sponsored healthcare, which must be destroyed - after all, we know that Jesus would support allowing the poor to die in the streets if they couldn't afford a doctor.

You did take into account the fact that two-thirds of all fertilized eggs fail to implant in the mother's womb, right? And if you allow this newly-legalized human life to be simply flushed away, you are just as guilty as the murderous woman who refused to allow the child berth in her womb!

That is really a tricky question when you think about it. If life does begin at conception, wouldn't Heaven be filled wall-to-wall with little floating fetuses? But then again, since they were never baptized and never accepted Jesus into their unformed hearts, they would have gone straight to Hell, where their little unborn souls could simply be used as fuel for the furnaces. This would be very efficient, and exactly the way that a loving God would have designed the system.

I suppose that it's possible that you were unaware of this dirty little secret of human pregnancy. After all, Alabama's educational system does rank about forty-fifth among the fifty states, and as a graduate of the University of Alabama, this does place you at a disadvantage.

But I'm sure that you aren't adding billions of dollars to the Alabama deficit simply because you're stubbornly, pig-ignorantly arrogant, but simply because you love Alabama so much.

Thank you for your time,
A Concerned Citizen
_______________

Update: So, it seems that Rep. Merrill, in the true spirit of Republican governance, doesn't really want to talk to people who aren't donating money to him.

Despite what it says on his webpage, the email address john@tuscaloosagop.org gets rejected immediately. Now, if you look into it a little, the link on his webpage actually opens up an email to ohn@tuscaloosagop.org (no "j"). And that email address actually makes it into the Tuscaloosa GOP servers before being rejected as nonexistent.

I suppose I could have printed it out and mailed it. After all, he provides both his work address and his office at the Statehouse (and his home address, for the love of Bacchus!) on his webpage. But that would take, you know, time and money and stuff. Instead, I sent it to every Democratic member of the Health Committee, who are currently considering both of Merrill's bills.

Easier that way.

Why Repealing DADT Is the Better Choice

Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) is still law. I think that it's bad law; however, I also think that President Obama has logical reasons for wanting Congress to repeal DADT rather than allowing a court ordered injunction to halt application of DADT or using an Executive Order to end DADT. Here's why.

It's dangerous territory for the president to attempt to repeal duly passed legislation via exercising his executive power. There is a tendency to make comparisons to Truman's use of an Executive Order to end segregation in the military. It's an invalid comparison. Truman didn't have to contravene existing federal law in order to desegregate the armed forces. Jim Crow segregation laws were a hodgepodge of state laws. It also should be noted that it was five years after Truman issued his executive order before the armed forces were more than 90% integrated.

A good friend feels that Obama needs to play hardball to earn the respect of Congress, either by directing the Justice Department not to appeal the court decision or by issuing an Executive Order to end DADT. I disagree. Obama won't earn their respect, they'll just use his actions as a ground for the ever growing rumblings about impeachment. It doesn't matter that they can't oust him; it didn't stop them when it came to Clinton. Impeachment is a time consuming process and detracts from time that the president needs to spend on important matters such as the economy.

Another risk is that if DADT is repealed by a court order rather that a change in law, it could succumb to the same fate as Brown v.the Topeka Board of Education. In the 1990s, white parents began bringing lawsuits against school systems arguing that the 1954 Brown decision had exceeded the authority of the courts. Specifically they opposed the use of race as a factor in pupil assignment to achieve integration. These cases were filed and won in federal courts. In 2007, the big kahuna of these cases was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court when two cases were combined, Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) v. Seattle School District. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the school systems in Seattle, WA and in Louisville, KY had violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by their use of a student's race in deciding whom to admit to particular public schools.

The decision has resulted in public school systems across the country being barred from using race as a factor in student assignments. Some systems have realized that they can still achieve racial integration if they use socioeconomic class in pupil assignments. However, the new trend is the one playing out in my local school system. The newest board members want to abandon the use of socioeconomic class and make assignments to neighborhood schools, the same term used in the 1960s as not so subtle language for maintaining segregated schools. The result has been a resegregation of schools not just in the south but particularly in major cities in the Midwest and Northeast. According to a 2009 report by Professor Gary Orfield, "...40 % of Latinos and 39 % of blacks now attend intensely segregated schools, in which 90 to 100 percent of students are non-White. The typical Black or Latino student attends a school where nearly 60% of the students are low-income, creating a doubly-damaging race and poverty divide that is worsening the isolation felt by these minority communities."


What courts render, they can undo. It took nearly 50 years to undo Brown, I think that it won't take nearly as long to reverse a decision from the courts to repeal DADT. Especially as the current decision is from a federal district court, not the Supreme Court.

Let's say Obama successfully issues an executive order ending DADT. Let's assume that he wins in 2012. DADT will remain repealed. In 2016, he can't run again. Say a Republican wins the presidency, a conservative right winger who ran on a program of promising to reinstate DADT. He/She could follow Obama's precedent and do it using an executive order. He or she wouldn't be making new law; the law was never repealed. Or a party with standing could file a federal lawsuit that DADT was unconstitutional--perhaps some members of the military who believe that DADT demeans morale. SCOTUS agrees to hear the case and holds that the use of an executive order to repeal DADT was a violation of the authority of the executive office because it stepped in prior to there being a chance for Congress to hear and vote on whether to repeal DADT.

All of this is supposition but it's plausible supposition. If I've thought of this, you can bet Obama, who is a true constitutional scholar and a lot more knowledgeable lawyer than I am, has considered this and that he and his staff have been discussing all the angles.

I'd like to see DADT repealed by Congress. However, it's like in the horror movies when some nitwit knocks out the monster and doesn't make certain that it's really dead. If DADT isn't killed outright it will rise again and bite us in the butt.

So what can we do? The bill repealing DADT has already been passed by the House; it's being held up in the senate. Contact the Senators who are sitting on the fence and the leading democrats in the senate. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) recommends that we contact the following Senators via email, snail mail, or telephone calls and tell them that you support repealing DADT. Harry Reid (D-NV), Carl Levin (D-MI), Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Scott Brown (R-MA), George Voinovich (R-OH), Kit Bond (R-MO), Joe Mancin (D-WV), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Kirk (R-IL).

There are multiple sites that you can use to get email, snail mail addresses, and phone numbers for your senators. My favorite is
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/.

Other sites are:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

and http://www.senate.gov/