While we wait...

..for Judge Joe Hart to issue his ruling in the TRMPAC case, let's catch up with what people are saying about "The D.A. and Tom DeLay".

The first block quote below is from the CBS transcript of last Sunday's 6o Minutes piece:

DeLay’s fellow Texan, Republican Rep. John Carter, says whether the law was broken depends on what your definition of “administrative” is. "No court has actually defined clearly what administrative purposes is," says Carter. 60 Minutes showed him TRMPAC's brochure with the statement of how the corporate funds would be spent. "Active candidate evaluation and recruitment. Message development. Market research and issue development," says Stahl. "I mean, how is that administrative?"

"Active candidate evaluation and recruitment, that’s a party of administrative procedure," says Carter. "That’s a party function."

"I thought administration was the running of the office. The Xerox machine. Paying bills," says Stahl.

"This is what the court has to rule on," says Carter. "If they find all these things are administrative, there’ll be no convictions in this case."

And here's Charlie Kuffner's take:

I'd like to propose an alternate explanation to the question of why no court has ever ruled on what constitutes an "administrative purpose". There's no case law because no one has ever come anywhere close to violating this century-old law before, and the reason for that is because anyone with two brain cells to rub together can plainly see that "administrative" means "non-political". When you have a law that is crystal clear, and that draws a very bright line, as this one does, it seems to me that you should expect there to be very little case law because there should be no confusion about what the law says. Nobody's been brazen enough before to claim that confusion was even a plausible explanation. If they get away with it now, then this law never actually meant anything.

Norm Ornstein's clever quip about Mother Teresa getting caught turning right on red in a state that doesn't allow it is spot on. This isn't an honest mistake, it isn't a testing of boundaries, and it isn't a case of the law not keeping up with new technologies. It's shameless pettifoggery, and it deserves to be slapped down.

It's this kind of duplicitous bullshit and slavish toadying performed by footlickers like Carter that makes me despise the Republican party. DeLay ought to be tarred and feathered, and all of his minions in the House know it, and they just don't have the stones to do so, much less speak up about it. They continue to vouch for him, cover for him, run interference, and punish those who dare stand up and speak out.

Tom DeLay is precisely the reason why the GOP invites comparisons to the Nazis.

If they know what's good for them, they'll get rid of him. I ain't counting on the Repubs to take out their own trash, though. And if Joe Hart doesn't oblige, and Ronnie Earl gets derailed, well, there's another opportunity for Richard Morrison in a bit less than two years.

Deal with it, you whiny xenophobes

I'm always bemused by xenophobic conservatives who, when confronted with negative opinions of the United States voiced by those living in other countries, sniff indignantly that they don't care what foreigners think.

Usually they resort to the childish name-calling ("Old Europe", "freedom fries") but mostly it's the hypocrisy exhibited that smells so ripe. These whiners are taking advantage of a technology -- the Web -- that makes the world smaller, yet they complain when they hear a differing viewpoint that might have originated in another language.

We should care what everyone thinks of each other when the world is this small -- and shrinking. And that's why sites like Watching America are so cool.

Watching America translates news stories about the United States from foreign newspaper Web sites into English, and also provides links to the native-language version. For example, a March 2 story that ran in Spain's El Mundo tells of that country's help in alerting the U.S. to al-Qaida plans to attack Grand Central Station in New York. You can read the English translation, the original Spanish version and a machine-translated rendition of El Mundo's home page.

I found WA at Bob Harris' blog, and his comments are worth repeating also:

To those of you not yet in the habit of reading the news as it's written overseas, the selections might seem biased, or even bluntly anti-American. Which, um, is the thing. After reading local papers during my own recent bounces around the planet, I can't say this is particularly unrepresentative. In any case, if you're interested, the bottom of the front page also provides a ton of links to the home pages of media from across the planet, so you can easily do your own digging and think for yourself. Bush really has alienated vast swaths of humanity, and the only place that isn't screamingly obvious is within these very borders.

It's a bit like having to live in an alcoholic household, really. Inside the house, Dad's really a good guy who just needs us to love him a little more and work a little harder and meanwhile the "good" kids are the ones enabling him and the ones who actually see that he's just a selfish f***ing drunk are very, very bad.

I suppose this puts people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in the enabling-mother role, unable to see the faults in the man they love, no matter how obvious, and willing to lash out at anyone who asks why he's picking fights, not taking care of the house, and running up enormous debts.

Seems about right.