“I uset be a bad person, but I have now gone straight, as can be proved by my record: t’oity-t’ree arrests and no convictions!”
- Jerry Orbach, from his role in Guys and Dolls (1935-2004)

The following was sent to me via an e-mail from the Advocates for Self-Goverment:

Will the Feds Bust Santa Claus?

When Santa Claus comes to town this week, he’d better watch out — because the federal government may be making a list of his crimes (and checking it twice), the Libertarian Party warned today.

“Hark the federal agents sing, Santa is guilty of nearly everything,” said Libertarian Party press secretary George Getz. “The feds know when Santa’s been bad or good — and he’s been bad, for goodness sakes.”

Does Santa belong in the slammer? Instead of stuffing stockings, should he be making license plates?

Yes, said Getz, if he’s held to the same standards as a typical American. For example:

* Every December 25, the illegal immigrant known as Santa Claus crosses the border into the United States without a passport.
* He carries concealed contraband, which he sneaks into the country in order to avoid inspection by the U.S. Customs Service. And just what’s in all those brightly colored packages tied up with ribbons, anyway? The Drug Czar and Homeland Security want to know.
* Look at how this international fugitive gets around: Santa flies in a custom-built sleigh that hasn’t been approved by the FAA. He never files a flight plan. He has no pilot’s license. In the dark of night, he rides the skies with just a tiny bioluminescent red light to guide him — a clear violation of traffic safety regulations.
* Pulling Santa’s sleigh: Eight tiny reindeer, a federally protected species being put to hard labor. None of these reindeer have their required shots, and Santa’s never bothered to get these genetically-engineered animals registered and licensed. It’s no wonder: He keeps them penned outside his workplace in a clear violation of zoning laws.
* But Crooked Claus the Conniving Capitalist harms more than just animals — he’s hurting hard-working American laborers, too. Isn’t Santa’s Workshop really Santa’s Sweatshop, where his non-union employees don’t make minimum wage and get no holiday pay? Add the fact that OSHA has never inspected the place, and you have a Third-World elf-exploitation operation that only Kathy Lee Gifford could love.
* No wonder Santa is able to maintain his monopoly over the toy distribution industry: He’s cornered the Christmas gift market. Santa dares to give away his products for free in a sinister attempt to crush all competition — just like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Antitrust Lawsuit Memo to the feds: Is Santa Claus the Bill Gates of Christmas?

The bottom line, said Getz: “It might be tough sledding for Jolly St. Nick this Christmas if the government decides to prosecute him.

“We’re just surprised it hasn’t already happened. After all, Santa Claus is everything that politicians aren’t: He’s popular, reliable, and gives us something for nothing every December 25th — instead of taking our money every April 15th.”

(Source: Libertarian Party press release, written by George Getz)

From the Washington Post:

This month, in a little-noted administrative decision, the Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to a Harvard proposal to test the benefits of the illegal street drug known as “ecstasy” in patients diagnosed with severe anxiety related to advanced cancer.

The drug, also known as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, has been referred to by psychiatrists as an “empathogen,” a drug especially good at putting people in touch with their emotions. Some believe it could help patients come to terms with the biggest emotional challenge of all: the end of life.

Oh how I love watching people jump to conclusions that because the government says something is dangerous we assume it can’t be used to help certain people.

“A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.)

The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. ‘Is there anyone here,’ he says to them, ‘who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?’

They murmur and say, ‘We all know of the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.’

The rabbi says, ‘Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.’ He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, ‘Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.’

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, ‘Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.’

The people are abashed and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.

‘Nor am I without sin,’ he says to the people. ‘But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.’

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.

So, of course, we killed him.”
– from Orson Scott Card’s Speaker For the Dead

Matthew Yglesias risks his liberal credentials by pointing out the horrific oppression of Christianity in America today and comparing it to South African apartheid.

More recently, the judicial system has further marginalized Christian belief by deeming it unconstitutional to place a replica of the Ten Commandments in an Alabama courthouse. This despite the fact that these Ten Commandments are not merely the basis of Christian (and, to be fair, Jewish) morality but also the foundation of our legal system. From where else could we have derived such legal principles as the prohibition on murder, the mandatory honoring of thy father and thy mother, and the well-known prohibition on coveting thy neighbor’s wife (or his house, maidservant, manservant, ox, or ass)?

Black South Africans were similarly marginalized — ineligible to serve as police, prosecutors, judges, or jurors, leading naturally to a discriminatory impact in the application of even racially neutral laws. In fact, blacks were not even allowed to vote, which is in many ways similar to how conservative Christian candidates for office in America often lose elections (though they do happen to control the presidency and both houses of Congress at the moment).

Shockingly horrible, isn’t it? I swear, my heart absolutely breaks for the poor Christian minority in this country. Will their faith ever survive the unrelenting assault of people saying “Happy Holidays” to each other?

“The Constitutional Law exam went very well, but I’m going to have nightmares about John Ashcroft tattling to my parents about my sex life for a week.”
– Tom Traina

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
– Yeshua ben Joseph

I’ve often times referred you to editorials written by the regular contributors to FindLaw’s news site, but these two editorials are also quite excellent.

The first is written by John Dean, former White House Counsel during the Nixon administration, and addresses an interesting question: what unites conservatives nowadays? In addition to comparing 3 “conservative” groups, (The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute) Dean looks at two conservative politicans who are polar opposites: Barry Goldwater and George W. Bush.

Dean goes on to conclude that the only thing uniting the current “conservative” coalition is an antipathy towards liberalism:

Sidney Blumenthal [concluded] that “conservatism requires liberalism for its meaning.” For “without the enemy [of liberalism] to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organizing principle.”

I have come to agree [...] that conservativism no longer can be accurately defined. There is no Conservative Manifesto. And as the speeches and books I have cited show, there are endless and widely varying descriptions of contemporary conservative beliefs.

The second editorial I would suggest is today’s, and deals with the legality of teaching “intelligent design” in public school under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The author analyzes the Intelligent Design “theory” (a term he shoots down as inapplicable to what Intelligent Design actually is) in light of a 1987 Supreme Court decision that illegalized the teaching of evolution without teaching “creationist science” alongside it. The Court in 1987 found that the legislature’s “purpose” in passing this law was to teach a religious belief to children, and that violated the Establishment Clause. The author goes on to explain why Intelligent Design isn’t a “scientific theory” (and frankly only skims the surface, there are manymore reasons than he mentions in the article), and concluded laws that mandate that ID be taught are objectively done to require the teaching of an inherently religious idea, thus equally violative of the Establishment Clause.

These are both very good reads, I highly suggest them both.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
– Yeshua ben Joseph

J.K. Rowling has finished writing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The release date has been marked as July 16, 2005. Also, by some reports, it’s “a bit shorter” than the last one. Which is good, because if those books kept getting longer, they’d have to ship them with hand carts. Not that I would mind a longer Harry Potter book, mind you.

For those of you keeping track, here’s my current geek calendar for 2005:

March 1 - Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card is released.

April 1 - Sin City is released in theaters.

June 17 - Batman Begins is released in theaters.

July 16 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling is released.

September 30 - Serenity is released in theaters.

I’m sure I’ll update this calendar sporadically throughout the year.