Quotes from the Greatest Progressive to Ever Live. [View all]

[geek tragedy]

A law requiring a woman to notify her husband before she can abort her baby (not that she obtain consent of her husband, and not that she notify the father of her baby -- only that she notify her husband, if she has one) -- does not seem that it would greatly offend very many people beyond the hard-core, absolutist pro-choice minority, which is going to oppose Alito no matter what.

(emphasis in original)

This approach would shift this part of the debate from whether it is really all that horrendous to require that husbands be notified before their babies are aborted (something on which there would likely be substantial debate) to the much more potent question (from an anti-Alito perspective) of whether we want to (a) roughly maintain or (b) radically alter the centrist balance which the Court has maintained for the last 25 years, at least.

(From the list of 10 worst Americans) (7) Harry Blackmun - With a single, intellectually flimsy judicial opinion, did more than anyone else to inflame and render irresolvable America’s paralyzing and internally destructive culture war.

From these premises, Brazilians perceptively concluded that the absolute worst option would be for its law-abiding citizens to disarm en masse, leaving them even more vulnerable and undefended against the nation's well-armed criminals -- who (being criminals) would, of course, defy the gun ban and continue to stockpile firearms.

Brazilians realized that the last thing they wanted to do was to bestow upon the nation's theives, muggers, kidnappers and murderers the peace of mind of knowing that they can invade whatever homes they want or assault whomever they want with impunity, free of the fear that their victims may be as well-armed as they are. Nor did Brazilians want to cede the right to protect themselves to a Government which so drastically fails to fulfill its duty of protecting them.

Equally persuasive was the argument that a disarmed citizenry is more vulnerable not only to criminals but to government tyranny as well. In a country with a (relatively recent) history of military dictatorships and state repression, the argument that firearms played a crucial role in some of the 20th Century's most glorified citizen-led fights for freedom -- in Tiananman Square in China, by Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and by various repressed populations in World War II -- resonated loudly. Brazilians concluded that they were in far greater danger giving up the right to bear arms than they were in keeping that right.

(emphasis added)

There are, needless to say, some people who oppose illegal immigration due to racist or xenophobic sentiments, but you can find some people who advocate almost any perfectly innocuous position who do so with malignant motives. There are, for instance, people who oppose tax cuts because they are socialists, and there are people who criticize Israel and sympathize with Palestinians because they are anti-Semitic, and there are people who favor abortion because they are racists and thereby favor anything which would result in fewer minority babies being born.

(emphasis added)

Current illegal immigration – whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate – renders impossible the preservation of any national identity. That is so for reasons having nothing whatever to do with the skin color or origin of the immigrants and everything to do with the fact that what we end up with are segregated groups of people with allegiences to their enclaves, an inability to communicate, cultural perspectives incompatible with prevailing American culture, and absolutely nothing to bind them in any way to what we know as the United States.

(emphasis added)

The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known, and it gets worse every day. In short, illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone. Few people dispute this, and yet nothing is done.

A substantial part of the GOP base urgently wants Republicans, who now control the entire Federal Government, to take the lead in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. And yet the GOP, despite its unchallenged control, does virtually nothing, infuriating this sector of its party. The White House does worse than nothing; to the extent it acts on this issue at all, it is to introduce legislation designed to sanction and approve of illegal immigration through its “guest worker” program, a first cousin of all-out amnesty for illegal immigrants.

(emphasis added)

The real reason Republicans treat the need to address the illegal immigration problem like a trip to the dentist -- as something they want to avoid at all costs -- is because they have been convinced that adopting an aggressive stance on illegal immigration will cost them too many votes among the nation’s ethnic minorities and legal immigrants. And that is what brings us to Sanchez’s Op-Ed, which illustrates just how unconvincing and baseless that alarmist view really is.

The “substance” of this claim is facially ludicrous and easily dismissed. There already is a “closed sign on the border” when it comes to illegal immigration. It’s called the law. The problem is that the “closed sign” isn’t being enforced because the Federal Government, which has its interfering, power-hungry hands in virtually everything else, has abdicated its duty in one of the very few areas where it was actually meant to be: border security.

(emphasis added)

I'm also in favor of reeling in the painfully overbroad Commerce Clause, which more than anything else has enabled the Federal Government to stick its claws in things which were clearly intended to be reserved for the states

So there. He's obviously never been a libertarian rightwinger.