Robert Mueller died on March 20, 2026. The next day, TЯ★MP posted on Truth Social: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”
In his March 25 conversation with James Webb, Tucker Carlson offered a thought worth keeping: “there’s a certain reverence in death that’s required if you’re going to have reverence for life.”
In this view, if I had Tiger Woods’s genes, and was born into his environment, I’d become exactly what he’s become. And so too with all others who violate norms or laws, including the most heinous criminals: If any of us had been born with their genes, into their environment, presumably we’d have become them. So how can we possibly condemn or punish them? Yet, as a practical matter, we have to punish heinous criminals, right?First, I'd like to respond to his major premise: that athletes like Tiger serve as de facto role models in our society, and so their personal behavior off the athletic field is very important. He may be right that children do hold up athletes as role models, but perhaps this is a failure in our parenting. Perhaps the focus ought to be on getting children to recognize altruistic and philanthropic behaviors as superior indicators of character, and thus emulation, to athletic prowess. Perhaps we should spend more time explaining that athletes are just really good at their sport, not superheroes worthy of all-around emulation.
In your autobiography, you admit to using marijuana and cocaine in high school and college. Yet you largely support the federal drug war — a change from several years ago when you said you'd be open to decriminalizing marijuana. Would Barack Obama be where he is today if he had been arrested in college for using drugs? Doesn't the fact that you and our current president (who has all but admitted to prior drug use) have risen to such high stature suggest that the worst thing about illicit drugs is not the drugs themselves, but what the government will do to you if you're caught?Bingo. The number of people in our country who have at least tried pot is staggeringly high, with at least 15 million people in the US having smoked marijuana within the last month. This while the overwhelming majority of those people go on to lead completely normal lives drug-free later one (I am one). Why ruin their chances to have good jobs and educational opportunities [Federal law prohibits people who've been caught with pot from receiving financial aid]?
Already a well-known figure, Copeland has come under greater scrutiny in recent months. He is one target of a Senate Finance Committee investigation into allegations of questionable spending and lax financial accountability at six large televangelist organizations that preach health-and-wealth theology.I'd love to see this crook thrown in jail, but it's enough to hope for all the money he's misused to be taxed. From their supposed needs for private jets to their staying in $5,000 a night resorts during "evangelistic trips" and driving Bentleys that they write off as "work-related vehicles"...it all just makes me sick. Paula and Randy White have probably cooperated more than anyone else, but with their ongoing divorce and financial issues, it's understandable that they can't take any more heat.
All have denied wrongdoing, but Copeland has fought back the hardest, refusing to answer most questions from the inquiry's architect, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.
...
Swicegood said the church's independent compensation committee approves all payments to board members.
Marilyn Phelan, a Texas Tech University law professor and author on nonprofit law, said the practice could pose problems. Both the IRS and Texas state law prohibit benefits beyond reasonable compensation for insiders, including board members, she said. If violations are found, nonprofits can lose their tax-exempt status and board members can face penalty taxes.
As the Senate Finance Committee considers its next step, Copeland is not backing down. His ministry is portraying the inquiry as an attack on religious liberty.
At the same time, it is moving forward with a big fund-raising project: soliciting donations for new television equipment so Copeland can be broadcast in high-definition.
There is nothing in the California majority opinion that necessarily limits “loving and long-term relationships” to two people, or even people who are unrelated to one another. The biggest impediment is our revulsion at polygamy and incest—revulsions that can be swept aside by activist judges as easily as the millennia-old revulsion toward same-sex “marriage.”I want to look at this common "slippery slope"-style argument.
That would only leave the argument that these arrangements pose a threat to the health and well-being of children.
Because civilization provides the best odds for their children to live to adulthood. So even though civilized individuals can't pursue the most obviously pleasurable and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction in a civilized society -- whether they personally like the rules or not.Get that? The impetus on government is to protect and prolong our society and civilization. This takes the primary aim of marriage as reproduction. Of course, given that many marriages are childless, either because one or both of the spouses are infertile, or because they simply don't want kids, one must wonder if in this paradigm it would entail that government should regulate marriage further than it already does and restrict it to only couples who are fertile and want children. It's already clear that these anti-gay so-called "family advocates" are in favor of tightening restrictions on divorce, overturning a woman's right to choose, as well as making birth control less readily available, so it's obvious that they think that the government's compelling interest is not just to keep the "rules of marriage" immutable, but to literally control the reproduction of society.
Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest. It's such an obvious principle that few civilizations have even attempted to flout it.
Even if the political system changes, as long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization can go on.
01/04 -- Chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay resigns, saying he doesn’t believe Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction ever existed.Talk about an "if-then" situation. If I'd known the above (and more, so much more), I would certainly have had a different political frame of mind at the time. But I did not, and so I was telling my colleague that I thought the Supreme Court should move a little to the right as I felt, at the time, it was perhaps a little too far left-of-center.
05/04 -- Army acknowledges it is investigating at least thirty-five cases of abuse or torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
06/04 -- U.S. commission investigating September 11 finds “no credible evidence” linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks; Dick Cheney continues to claim “overwhelming evidence” of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
08/04 -- For third consecutive year, more Americans in poverty and without health insurance; national poverty rate hits 12.5 percent, 45 million people lack health coverage.
09/04 -- Iraqi Health Ministry statistics show U.S. and allied forces and Iraqi police are killing twice the number of Iraqis—mostly civilians—as the insurgents; officials announce that Health Ministry will no longer provide casualty statistics to reporters.
10/04 -- Chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer reports that Iraq had no biological or chemical weapons and no nuclear program before the U.S. invasion; in fact, Duelfer finds no evidence that Iraq had produced any WMDs after 1991.
I feel so guilty for my complicity in supporting a more conservative SCOTUS now. What kind of screwed up logic states that a systemic corporate policy of discrimination is a crime for only six months? Not that the Court's illogic stops with anti-labor legal rulings. It goes deeper and darker -- to the death penalty, state-church separation and the Bill of Rights for persons accused in crimes. What I now know is the absolutely crucial role of a President in picking justices. A horrid executive leads to horrid justices, which is what we saw in 2005. The next president had better damn well be liberal and nominate liberal justices in order to bring back a semblance of balance to the far-right court as it exists today. I'll be doing my part.The fact that workers generally have no idea what other people are making when they start a job did not concern the court nearly as much as what Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, called “the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past.” In other words, pay discrimination is illegal unless it goes on for more than six months.
Ledbetter did not even get her back pay. And Goodyear billed her $3,165 for court-related costs.
NRA continues to hold dominion over VirginiaAfter this was written, we had the NIU shootings. Did he get those guns illegally? Nope.
Posted January 26th, 2008 at 9:30 amGuest Post by Morbo
After the Virginia Tech massacre, I wrote a post predicting that the horrific incident would do nothing to change our gun policy. I secretly hoped I’d be proven wrong. Sadly, it looks like I won’t.
In Virginia, lawmakers have rejected modest legislation closing a loophole that allows people to buy weapons at gun shows without undergoing a background check. This should be a no-brainer after what happened, but still the measure failed.
Gun-control advocates, including survivors of the April 16 shooting rampage that took the lives of 32 victims at Virginia Tech, poured into a Senate committee meeting to support a bill that would require background checks for all gun-show sales. They then staged a “lie-in,” lying on their backs outside the Capitol to draw attention to gun deaths in Virginia last year.
Some of the survivors offered compelling personal testimony. Colin Goddard, 22, who survived the shootings and is now a senior at the school, cut to the chase when he said: “People tell me I am alive because of God or luck or a bunch of other stuff. I don’t know how much I can accept any of those, but one thing I can’t accept is that it was just criminals being criminals and I was just caught in the wrong situation at the wrong time.”
Amazingly, several gun nuts attended this event with weapons strapped on their hips. That’s right — in Virginia, it is legal to attend a public meeting of government representatives wearing a pistol. One complained that background checks are “onerous” because they can take as long as one day to complete.
At the hearing, some of the surviving students were approached by gun nuts who explained to them that had the students been armed, they could have taken out the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui. These gun nuts are clearly disturbed — yet the legislature listens to them, not the families of those who were killed.A panel of the Virginia House of Delegates had already voted down closing the loophole. The Senate hearing was an attempt to revive it, but on Wednesday the members of the Courts of Justice Committee voted it down 9-6. All seven Republicans on the committee voted against it, as did two Democrats.
To the gun nuts, “gun control” is synonymous with seizure of weapons. They do this on purpose to frighten people. Thus, the debate becomes whether people can have guns or not instead of what reasonable restrictions we can put in place to make sure the wrong people don’t have access to guns. I don’t want to take away the rifle your uncle Fred uses to hunt deer. I do want to make sure that a deranged person can’t go to a gun show, walk out with an assault rifle and head for the nearest middle school.
If Virginia won’t even pass a baby-step measure like this in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings, then all hope for any sensible gun laws in that state is lost. As I said back in April, we are left to wait until some other deranged person decides to top Cho Seung-Hui’s grim record.
The graduate student bought two of his four guns at a Champaign, Ill., gun store Saturday — indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News' Richard Esposito and Pierre Thomas report. The other weapons were purchased from the same store in December and August 2007.
for whatever reason, our politicians seem achingly incapable of simply leaving Iraq. So it's worth asking if a military deployment is really the most cost-effective way to spend billions and billions in Iraq. This site, in fact, asks the question well. "The US budget for Iraq in FY 2006 comes to $3,749/Iraqi. This is more than double their per person GDP. It's like spending $91,000 per person in the US. Why not just bribe the whole country?" But seriously: Why not just bribe the whole country? If we're determined to commit an enormous amount of resources to the Iraqi people, why not let the Ghost of Milton Friedman take over and simply design some sort of program that offers enormous economic benefits in exchange for reductions in violence?A win for progress in the war against "the war on drugs" -- the harsh crack sentencing guidelines are coming into line with those for powdered cocaine:
I've said it before:African-Americans were nearly 82 percent of defendants sentenced in federal court for dealing crack, but only 27 percent of those sentenced for dealing powder cocaine, according to 2006 federal statistics. Each year, federal courts handle about 11,000 cocaine sentences, which are roughly evenly divided between crack and cocaine cases.
The issue long has been a source of contention between government prosecutors and civil rights advocates, who argue crack dealers are often targeted for longer prison terms because that drug is prevalent in urban and minority communities, while the powdered version is more commonly associated with higher-income users.
I strongly disagree with complete libertarians with respect to drug policy who think that controlling substances is unnecessary/illegal on the part of the government, especially in light of drugs like Oxycontin(TM). That said, the legalization of marijuana is necessary, even if it may cause a slowdown of brain processing speed. I don't even smoke it (honest, not since 1999), but it is definitely far past the time to de-criminalize it for a plethora of reasons.I'd go further and point out that people who are convicted of felonies for using drugs are much less able to go on to lead productive lives afterwards due to their criminal record. This all but insures that they will remain trapped in a criminal lifestyle, and converts many formerly-productive citizens into drug dealers. I think many substances ought to be controlled by the government, but de-criminalized.
...the issues Locke identified and analyzed will never be resolved. In her dissent in Boerne, Justice O’Connor wrote, “Our Nation’s Founders conceived of a Republic receptive to voluntary religious expression, not a secular society in which religious expression is tolerated only when it does not conflict with generally applicable law.”His language is tilted towards the former policy, and that means he's gained back a little of my respect.
Yes, that’s the question. Do we begin by assuming the special status of religious expression and reason from there? Or do we begin with the rule of law and look with suspicion on any claim to be exempt for it, even if the claim is made in the name of apparently benign religious motives? [emphasis mine]
The author strongly criticizes National Geographic for getting it wrong. Interesting, but not very likely to impact the scholarly Christian rejection of the document either way. Mainstream Evangelicals would probably be more likely to support the document now, though, since it jives better with their interpretation of Judas.So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.
Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.
The studies have been the subject of sharp criticism, much of it from legal scholars who say that the theories of economists do not apply to the violent world of crime and punishment. Critics of the studies say they are based on faulty premises, insufficient data and flawed methodologies.also,
The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”
Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”
But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types — not simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”
“I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds,” said Joanna M. Shepherd, a law professor at Emory with a doctorate in economics who wrote or contributed to several studies. “But I do believe that people respond to incentives.”The first sentence of the second paragraph should be seized upon. An overwhelming majority of murders are not committed by people in a cool, calm, rational frame of mind. Besides, if killing murderers is effective at preventing future murders, so too would life imprisonment with no chance of parole. This latter option would actually be cheaper, not to mention more moral, as there would be no chance of killing an innocent person and any innocent parties would have ample time to file appeals and work towards showing exculpatory evidence.
But not everyone agrees that potential murderers know enough or can think clearly enough to make rational calculations. And the chances of being caught, convicted, sentenced to death and executed are in any event quite remote. Only about one in 300 homicides results in an execution.
It adds that blaming God for human oppression and suffering misses an important point.Oh come on, God, that canard doesn't hold up to logical analysis.
"I created man and woman with free will and next to the promise of immortal life, free will is my greatest gift to you," according to the response, as read by Friend.
In April, Jerry Miller, an Illinois man who served 24 years for a rape he did not commit, became the 200th American prisoner cleared by DNA evidence. His case, like the 199 others, represented a catastrophic failure of the criminal justice system.And people wonder why I'm against the death penalty...
...
Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
Taxpayers, he said, "set out a parade of horribles that they claim could occur" by allowing such faith-based funding to continue, suggesting the federal government could build a national house of worship, or buy Jewish Stars of David and distribute them to public employees.*sigh*
"Of course none of these things has happened," said Alito, and "in the unlikely event that any of these executive actions did take place, Congress could quickly step in."