One for you Anti-St. Patrick's Day types...

I saw a message on one of the other for a I frequent this morning from somebody who replied to a thread wishing everybody a Happy (etc) with "You'll forgive me for not raising a glass to a man whose life's goal was to destroy Pagan holy sites."

Ok, fair enough. Don't honor a man whose actions you can't stomach - that's your right. But not everybody observes the man's day to honor him. Oh, I'm honoring somebody, all right. But who I choose to honor on this day are the ancestors that were starved out of the country. When I raise my glass, it's to say to those people, "Thank you for your sacrifices. Without what you endured, and what you did as a result of that, I wouldn't be here."

So if you need me tonight, I'll be off treating this as my own familial Memorial Day, as per usual.

Bill First Makes Incredibly Stupid Defense Of Boy Scouts

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050317-101936-3880r

And to sum up in two words why I think that what Senator First is doing is so mind-bogglingly stupid that they need to invent an entirely new vocabulary to encompass how stupid an idea this is: Camel's nose.

What? You want me to explain that, rather than just gibbering mindlessly with outrage? Ok, fine. Just let me gibber a bit first.

Gibber.

Ok, now, on to the explanation: There's an old saying about how once you let the camel get its nose into the tent, you're not getting him out of it. Mothalovin' camel in da tent, yo.

And here's the olfactory organ in question: "The bill says no federal law, directive, rule, instruction or order should limit any federal agency from providing support to the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, including meetings held on federal property."

Now, if one wants to take that to its most ridiculous extreme, one might choose to ignore the fact that First is trying to usurp the authority of the Judicial and legislative branches (one would not be dealing with the specific camel's nose we're dealing with here, but one could, regardless, do that,) and say that by law, this means that a Boy Scout troop could hold its meetings in the Oval Office, and the Secret Service couldn't say "boo." They could still shoot the scouts who didn't say "God" during the Pledge of Allegiance, but hey, Senator First has to deal with one thing at a time, right?

Or if one wanted to be slightly less over-the-top, one could do what one did when one was writing this post about what one could do.

Which was, before I let myself get amused at my own writing, reflect on how this would set a bad precedent. If we let this piece of legislative sewage bubble up to the top of the tank, we have to start applying it to other groups.

All other groups.

Remember Tim McVeigh? This would let a militia group just like the ones he was part of force the government to let them hold their meetings in the same federal buildings they planned to blow up - and allow them a chance to scope out the insides of the buildings to determine where the weakest points were.

Think that one aver awhile, and then decide whether you think First had a good idea or not.