Huh? Whah?...Huh?

There's crazie and then there's World Net Daily Cuh-RAY-zee!

Check it out:

The Kansas Supreme Court has come up with a response for when its own justices are accused of being biased toward the abortion industry and against a former state attorney general who investigated alleged criminal activity there.

Stonewall.

That’s the result of a petition to the court that was filed on behalf of former Attorney General Phill Kline.

Kline probed alleged illegal activity by abortion provider Planned Parenthood and the late abortionist George Tiller, eventually filing charges against them after getting the counts approved by several trial judges in the state.

However, the pro-abortion political atmosphere in the state spelled defeat for Kline in the next election, and his foes launched criminal investigations into his probe of Planned Parenthood and Tiller. [emphasis added]

That's right.  You read that right.  Kansas where the:

• Governor
• Lieutenant Governor
• Secretary of State
• Attorney General
• Both US Senators
• All four members of the US House of Representatives
• 31 out of the 40 State Senators
• 92 out of the 125 State House members

are all Republicans. 

Kansas, where Mitt Romney won the state in the 2012 election by about 22% of the vote.

Kansas, where according to the Guttmacher Institute:

• A woman must receive state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided.
• A woman must undergo an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion; the provider must offer her the option to view the image.

Yea, that Kansas.  How crazie must Bob Uruh (and World Net Daily for publishing this) be to think that the political atmosphere in Kansas can, in any way, be "pro-abortion"??

Tracking Teh Crazie At WND

Teh Crazie's still at it.

Take a look at this opening paragraph from Bob Unruh over at World Net Daily:

Let’s see, under Barack Obama the IRS targeted conservatives and Christians with harassment, dozens of “czars” were appointed, Arizona was sued for trying to enforce federal immigration laws, the government refused to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act and the National Security Agency spied on Americans.

If ever you need to know what teh rightwing crazies are thinking, WND is the place to go to find out.  From his opening, Unruh goes on to more about the IRS "target[ing] conservatives" and the poll data showing growing support for impeachment because of it.

It's only when you take a look at the question asked in the poll do you see the fakery going on.  Here's the question:

Under President Obama, the Internal Revenue Service has targeted conservative nonprofit groups for special scrutiny, including audits, which hampered those groups from organizing to oppose him and other Democrats in the 2012 elections. Do you agree or disagree that President Obama should be impeached for his handling of this situation?

The only problem with this push poll question is its entire premise.

Take a look at this from Salon from August 20:

We already know that the IRS targeted progressive groups in addition to Tea Party ones, but new information released today adds further details, showing that the tax agency also targeted “ACORN successors” and left-leaning “Emerge” groups. Emerge Nevada, Emerge Maine and Emerge Massachusetts were the only groups to have their applications actually denied 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Conservative groups had their applications delayed, in some cases for over a year, but not rejected outright.

Think of what that means for the poll question.  If the initial premise is incorrect (as it is here) then all of the data that follows is also incorrect.

And for this teh crazies want to impeach.

More On Representative Jeff Duncan

Remember this from yesterday?

The braintrust spread yet another wingnut conspiracy theory by way of Representative Jeff Duncan.

Well they should be more careful who they quote as it turns out that Duncan's a birther:

Another Republican is accusing President Obama of secretly being a Kenyan man who forged his birth certificate in order to get elected President of the United States. This time the theorist is Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC), chairman of the House Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee.

Duncan appeared on the radio program TruNews with Rick Wiles on Friday where the host asked the South Carolina congressman whether the House would go after Obama’s “phony identification papers.” Duncan initially demurred, but then agreed with Wiles that Obama could be lying about his birth certificate, calling for Congress to “revisit” the issue of “the president’s validity."

While it's hardly surprising that Duncan (who's seen quickly shifting from the "guv'ment's buyin' up all the ammo!" story to the "guv'ment's arming the IRS with assault rifles!" story in yesterday's Trib) is fertile ground for any number of other crazie conspiracies, nothing invalidates credibility faster than being a birther. 

The Trib really needs to be more careful who they're quoting as they're dancing dangerously close to World Net Daily on this one.

Tracking Teh Crazie - Alan Keyes at World Net Daily

You want teh crazie?  I got teh crazie, my friends.

Crazie plus crazie wouldn't describe how crazie it is.  Nor would crazie times crazie.  No, we gotta go bigger still - a crazieplex, perhaps.

Let me back up a second to explain.  A "googol" is a very big number.  It's 10¹⁰⁰ or 10 multiplied by itself 100 times and thus a one followed by 100 zeroes. A "googolplex" is even bigger. It's 10^googol or ten multiplied by itself a googol number of times.  Don't even try to contemplate writing it out.  There isn't enough time or space in spacetime to do so.

So when I say that whenever Alan Keyes writes for World Net Daily, we got a crazieplex (teh crazie^{teh crazie}) you'll more or less know exactly what I mean.

Ambassador Keyes (did you know he was an Ambassador during the Reagan Administration?  You did? Well, then did you know he was the one who negotiated the anti-choice language of the Mexico City Policy into the final resolution at that conference?  You didn't?  Well, now you do.) is more than well known for his controversial positions on sex, gender and women's health.

Well, today I found this faith based bit of intolerance at birther central - aka World Net Daily.

Keyes begins:

“California would strip the tax-exempt status from youth organizations like the Boy Scouts if they have policies that bar gay people from participating under a bill introduced at the Capitol Tuesday.” So began the report at sfgate.com. With prominent elitist faction GOP leaders like Mitt Romney pressing the BSA to end its ban on homosexual activity, the campaign to enforce respect for so-called “homosexual rights” is quickly moving toward what I have for a long time warned would be its inevitable result. By allowing the language of fundamental right to be abused in a way that perverts its logic, we have set the stage for the systematic abuse of the coercive power of government in order to force people to abandon their conscientious disapproval of homosexual behavior. Ideas have consequences, especially bad ideas.

Some people try to maintain the position that government has no lawful authority to interfere with human freedom. But according to the premises of American self-government, their view is patently illogical. The American Declaration of Independence (part of the organic law of the United States) states that all just governments are instituted to secure unalienable rights. When wrongdoers ignore and violate those rights (by criminal acts like murder, theft, rape, etc.) government is obliged to curtail their freedom. This is why the criminal law exists.

However, any action provably consistent with God’s natural law (as it applies to human activities) is an exercise of right. That’s why otherwise innocent people who kill to defend their lives against unwarranted attack are not charged with murder (unlawful killing), since their actions accord with the first law of nature. In this respect a provable claim of unalienable right trumps any provisions of human law that contradict it. The obligation to respect God’s authority supersedes the obligation to obey human authority.

I think our good friend Justice Antonin Scalia (he of the United States Supreme Court, doncha know) would disagree with Keyes on that last sentence. We quoted Scalia back in March of 2012:

We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate.

And:

Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."

Subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a "valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes)."

From this logic, let's just simply state that everything that follows from Keyes's assertion that the "obligation to respect God’s authority supersedes the obligation to obey human authority" is in direct opposition to the Constitution he claims to revere.

If you look closely, Keyes wants religious belief to be the law of the land - but only the right sorts of beliefs he already recognizes:

In what we call the Bill of Rights, preventing government coercion with respect to religion is the first order of business. This reflects the fact that the very idea of unalienable right depends on acknowledging that all human beings are obliged to respect “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”; that when they act accordingly they do what is right; and that they therefore have an unalienable right (i.e., a predisposition arising from the provision of God for their existence and well-being) to act as they do. As its origins may imply (from the Latin, religare, to bind fast) the word religion has to do with the views and practices connected with the natural sense that we are beholden to God for our existence, and bound to respect the provisions of God for our good.

Does this mean that every claim of right made in the name of religion authorizes people to break the law? Of course not; such claims must be examined in light of a reasonable appraisal of our knowledge of God’s law for our nature, as it applies to all human beings. Thus government may reasonably curtail the freedom of people who believe that their god requires them to murder innocent people (as was reportedly the case with the cult of devotees of the Hindu Goddess Kali, known as Thuggee; and as is true of some Islamic jihadists today.) In general a claim of religious belief, however sincerely asserted, does not supersede the obligation to respect the God-endowed natural rights of others. [Emphasis added.]

While he says that beliefs that lead to those "inalienable" rights are only those done in accordance with "the laws of nature and of Nature's God" and that only those actions, so defined, are the ones that are right, he then says that other, opposing beliefs, however sincerely held, don't have the same authority - and therefore actions taken in accordance with those religious beliefs can be curtailed.

So who decides which sincere beliefs are the right ones?  Who decides which ones are the foundations of the "inalienable rights" he's discussing?

That's right, Alan Keyes decides.  He decides what's right and wrong.  He decides (indeed, he's already decided) based only on his set of beliefs - a set of beliefs which he believes to coincide with God's.  Anyone else who has a different set of beliefs...well those beliefs, (again, however sincerely held) to the extent they disagree with what Keyes has already decided to be the "laws of nature and of Nature's God" can be ignored.

Alan Keyes must be a very important man - to Alan Keyes.

See? Crazieplex.

Tracking Teh Crazie - The "Unconstitutional" Minimum Wage

Every now and then it's good to take a peek at teh crazie - and we've done it more than a few times here at 2PJ.

Today, I'd like to look at this paragraph found at World Net Daily (actually it's from Mr Crazie himself, Joseph Farah):

My thought is that nobody in Washington – not Obama, not the Congress and not the Supreme Court – has any constitutional authority to insert itself between employers or potential employers and employees. If two consenting adults, as Obama believes, can do whatever they want to each other sexually, surely two consenting adults have the right to agree or not to agree to perform services for whatever wages they deem appropriate – without any interference from the federal government.

This is your more or less classic tenther argument about the minimum wage.  If it's not specifically spelled out on the Constitution, the Congress doesn't have the authority to implement it.

Too bad the Supreme Court already decided (in 1937!) that Congress does have the authority to set a minimum wage.  From West Coast Hotel v. Parrish:

In each case the violation alleged by those attacking minimum wage regulation for women is deprivation of freedom of contract. What is this freedom? The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation, the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. Liberty in each of its phases has its history and connotation. But the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. Liberty under the Constitution is thus necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and regulation which is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the interests of the community is due process. This essential limitation of liberty in general governs freedom of contract in particular. More than twenty-five years ago we set forth the applicable principle in these words, after referring to the cases where the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment had been broadly described.

'But it was recognized in the cases cited, as in many others, that freedom of contract is a qualified, and not an absolute, right. There is no absolute freedom to do as one wills or to contract as one chooses. The guaranty of liberty does not withdraw from legislative supervision that wide department of activity which consists of the making of contracts, or deny to government the power to provide restrictive safeguards. Liberty implies the absence of arbitrary restraint, not immunity from reasonable regulations and prohibitions imposed in the interests of the community.

This power under the Constitution to restrict freedom of contract has had many illustrations.  That it may be exercised in the public interest with respect to contracts between employer and employee is undeniable. [Emphases added.]

The United States Supreme Court, 75 years or so ago.

When given the opportunity 4 years later, the US Supreme Court said in US v. Darby:

Since our decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, it is no longer open to question that the fixing of a minimum wage is within the legislative power and that the bare fact of its exercise is not a denial of due process under the Fifth more than under the Fourteenth Amendment.

And yet, Joseph Farah and his merry band of truth-telling tenthers missed this decades old decision.

Rick Santorum at Birther Central

Back in December, the OPJ posted the news that our favorite Man-on-Dog ponderer, Rick Santorum, takes up column space at World Net Daily - aka Birther Central.

If that in itself isn't enough evidence to show how meaningless his political career has become, his most recent column certainly is.

While complaining about President Obama's "constitutional violations" he simply shows his own ignorance of that document.  But first Rick's frame:

President Obama’s announcement last week on his plans to make sweeping changes to our nation’s gun laws by presidential executive order is yet another example of his continual disregard for the United States Constitution and the separation of powers it set forth to protect the American people from government by fiat.

Rick might want to check with the radical leftist who was George W Bush's last Attorney General on the constitutionality of the president's gun control program:

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey appeared on the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” Wednesday night with a message that left the host looking rather disappointed.

Rebutting the Republican talk show host, Mukasey said that President Barack Obama’s executive orders so far have been legal, as much as he finds them distasteful.

Uh-oh.  But let's take a look at some of the examples that Rick uses show Obama's "continual disregard" of the Constitution.  This is first on the list:

Two days after he took office, President Obama rescinded by executive order the “Mexico City policy,” which prevents foreign aid going to organizations that perform or promote abortions. No legislation passed, no debate, just an executive order.

Um, Rick?  Do you know why only an executive order was necessary for the rescindment of the "Mexico City Policy"?

Because the enactment of that policy was implemented by an executive order - namely George W Bush's:

The Mexico City Policy announced by President Reagan in 1984 required nongovernmental organizations to agree as a condition of their receipt of Federal funds that such organizations would neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations. This policy was in effect until it was rescinded on January 22, 1993.

It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion, either here or abroad. It is therefore my belief that the Mexico City Policy should be restored. Accordingly, I hereby rescind the "Memorandum for the Acting Administrator of the Agency for International Development, Subject: AID Family Planning Grants/Mexico City Policy," dated January 22, 1993, and I direct the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development to reinstate in full all of the requirements of the Mexico City Policy in effect on January 19, 1993.

As you can plainly see, the history of the policy goes all the way back past Bill Clinton to Ronald Reagan. Each restoration/rescindment an executive branch decision, none requiring any sort of legislation.

It's simply embarrassing for a law school graduate to get this so amaurotically wrong.

Another thing Rick got wrong - his next example:

In early 2011, the Obama administration stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, a law duly passed by Congress and signed into law. Here President Obama has directed his Department of Justice to ignore the Constitution and separation of powers and not enforce a law.

For this, Politifact has done the research:

In February 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying that the Obama administration would no longer defend the law -- in court.

Holder argued that the law, as applied to same-sex couples legally married under state law, violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. While the letter stated that the Obama administration would not defend the law in two cases, it also stated that it will continue to be "enforced" by the executive branch until Congress repeals it, or the courts definitively strike it down.

And so on.

How many more things does Rick need to get wrong at WND before he's laughed off the stage?

Tracking Teh Crazie - Jerome Corsi. Again.

The wingnut birther conspiracy continues.

From Jerome Corsi at WND (of course):

NEW YORK – John Brennan, the Obama counter-terrorism adviser nominated this week to head the CIA, played a controversial role in what many suspect was an effort to sanitize Obama’s passport records.

On March 21, 2008, amid Obama’s first presidential campaign, two unnamed contract employees for the State Department were fired and a third was disciplined for breaching the passport file of Democratic presidential candidate and then-Sen. Barack Obama.

Breaking the story, the Washington Times on March 20, 2008, noted that all three had used their authorized computer network access to look up and read Obama’s records within the State Department consular affairs section that “possesses and stores passport information.”

And the connection to Brennan?  Take a look:

The New York Times noted the two offending State Department contract employees who were fired had worked for Stanley Inc., a company based in Arlington, Va., while the reprimanded worker continued to be employed by the Analysis Corporation of McLean, Va.

The newspaper gave no background on either corporation, other than to note that Stanley Inc. did “computer work for the government.”

At that time, Stanley Inc. was a 3,500-person technology firm that had just won a $570-million contract to provide computer-related passport services to the State Department.

Analysis Corporation was headed by Brennan, a former CIA agent who was then serving as an adviser on intelligence and foreign policy to Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign.

And since Brennan's "connected" to the intrusion it didn't take much for Corsi to paste in a conspiracy:

Investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman said a well-placed but unnamed source told him that the real point of the passport breach incidents was to cauterize the Obama file, removing from it any information that could prove damaging to his eligibility to be president.

Information like Obama's birthplace, of course.  Two things you should know about the source of Corsi's scoop above - it's Newsmax and it's from January of 2009 about events that took place almost a year earlier.  Was there any sort of investigation in to this?  Is any of it even possible?  Corsi, gives us a clue:

In July 2008, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a 104-page investigative report on the passport breach incidents, stamped “Sensitive But Unclassified.” The report was so heavily redacted, it was virtually useless to the public. Scores of passages were blacked out entirely, including one sequence of 29 consecutive pages that were each obliterated by a solid black box that made it impossible even to determine paragraph structures.

You can read the "virtually useless" report here. From the Executive Summary we learn:

In March 2008, media reports surfaced that the passport files maintained by the Department of State (Department) of three U.S. Senators, who were also presidential candidates, had been improperly accessed by Department employees and contract staff. On March 21, 2008, following the first reported breach and at the direction of the Acting Inspector General, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), Office of Audits, initiated this limited review of Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) controls over access to passport records in the Department’s Passport Information Electronic Records System (PIERS). Specifically, this review focused on determining whether the Department (1) adequately protects passport records and data contained in PIERS from unauthorized access and (2) responds effectively when incidents of unauthorized access occur.

So the unauthorized access was through the PIERS system. Now we're getting somewhere.  But can anyone actually do what Corsi says these low level data entry employees did?

Not really.  From page ten of the OIG report:

According to CA [Consular Affairs] officials, almost all PIERS users have “read only” access.

There's a foot note to that sentence which reads:

A small number of CA Directorate Staff can edit PIERS records as required by their positions.

So as it's only those State Department employees on the "CA Directorate Staff" who can edit (which, presumably would include "sanitize" or "cauterize") passport records and as the "connection" between Brennan and the snooping wasn't a State Department employee, Jerome Corsi's thesis (that Brennan "sanitized" Obama's passport records to cover up the "fact" that he was born in Kenya) is virtually useless.

But let's assume it's true.  It would be illegal, right?  But if that's the case then why would this happen?

Still, the New York Times report indicated then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had spent Friday morning calling all three presidential candidates and that she had told Obama that she was sorry for the violation.

“I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice said.

If Corsi is right, then Rice must've been in on it - if only to cover it up. Jerome Corsi - he's got teh crazie.

Tracking Teh Crazie - 22nd Amendment

I've seen this pop up in a few places and so I am assuming you have, too.

Here's teh crazie from la maison de crazie, WND:

Before President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his third and fourth terms in office, U.S. presidents had honored the limit established by George Washington that a president should serve no more than two.

And after, the 22nd Amendment formally restricted service in the Oval Office to two terms.

But now, U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., and a supporter of President Obama, has introduced House Joint Resolution 15 to repeal the 22nd Amendment and thus abolish presidential term limits.

The title of the piece, incidentally, is:

Democrat plan lets Obama run for 3rd term

So we all know it's a "Democrat" plot to "let" Obama rule for another 4 years - can't trust them lib'ruls, can you?  Can't trust 'em not to change the Constitution to suit their radical socialist agenda, can you?

Except this is not the first time Serrano has introduced this.  Nor is he the only one.  Indeed, there's a whole mess of details that WND left out.  Let's start with their very next paragraph:

Serrano has attempted this before, in 2003, 2009 and 2011 with little luck. H.J.R. 15 would require a two-thirds majority vote in favor in both the House and Senate and a majority of support from state legislatures.

Actually, according to snopes.com:

Rep. Serrano has introduced the very same proposal to Congress every two years since 1997 (a total of nine times), regardless of which party was currently occupying the White House...[Emphasis added.]

That's two resolutions for Clinton the philanderer, four for Bush the torturer, and now three for Obama, the guy who's letting Bush get away with the torture.

But I digress.

Here's the text of Serrano's resolution:

JOINT RESOLUTION
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission for ratification:

‘Article--
   ‘The twenty-second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.’. [Italics and Bolding in original.]

Did you know the current leaders in the Senate (McConnell and Reid) co-sponsored a very similar bill in 1995?  Word for word similar.

Did you know who said this?

...in thinking about it more and more, I have come to the conclusion that the 22nd Amendment was a mistake.

This person was also quoted as wondering whether the 22nd Amendment interferes with "the democratic rights of the people" Adding:

They can elect a Senator for 40 years or a Congressman—something of this kind—for as long as they want to. Why don't they have the right to vote for whoever they want to vote for?

Do you know who said that? That would be the 40th President of these United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan. And do you know when he said that?  You'd think, considering the frame teh crazie wants you to use, that it was when the Gipper was a Democrat.

You could think that, but you'd be wrong.

He said both those things in 1986 - during his second administration.  The first in an interview with Barbara Walters and the second during an interview with the Washington Post.

So yea, Serrano's resolution is a Democrat Plan to let Obama rule some more.

Tracking Teh Crazie.