CeltX is a high quality, cross platform and open source media pre-production tool that includes nice scriptwriting and scriptwriting modules (and much more).
Day: November 10, 2008
The First Rule of Monk Fight Club Is . . .
LOL. Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks throwing down in Jerusalem over some stupid protocol or another.
Hasbro’s 1990s Total Justice DC Line
ToyOtter.com has an obsessively complete look at Hasbro’s Total Justice line of DC action figures which the toy company manufactured from 1996 to 1998. I managed to pick up a pretty complete set of these at clearance prices last year, and as the author of the TJ guide notes, they sort of grow on you after awhile despite the obvious limitations in the sculpts and poses,
Barack Obama, Bill Ayers and Political Violence
Xeni Jardin over at Boing! Boing! highlights an absurd interview with Bill Ayers featuring (in Jardins words) “his suggestions on what those swept up in the current wave of hope following [Barack] Obama’s election might do to harness that excitement.”
Ayers, of course, is the former Weather Underground terrorist and Obama associate whom McCain tried (way too late and in a lousy way) to make an issue of when it was clear that he was going to lose the election.
It is odd to see just how easily left wingers who commit acts of political violence can be mainstreamed. It is difficult to imagine that happening in a similar way on the Right.
For example, imagine that John McCain had repeatedly associated with an anti-abortion activist who had led an underground group that attempted to bomb abortion clinics around the country during the 1980s. Does anyone seriously think that such an association would have been downplayed by the mainstream media the way Ayers was? Would left-liberals like Jardin approvingly cite, say, National Review if it made the mind boggling decision to run a political advice piece from such a former terrorist? In fact, anti-abortion advocates are generally considered beyond the pale when they coordinate plain old non-violent civil disobedience.
Somehow, I don’t think so. This is the same sort of dynamic that allows some left-liberals to deplore the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while cultivating the cult of Che Guevera. It’s the sort of dynamic that Bill Clinton relied on when he pardoned 16 members of the Puerto Rican nationalist FALN in 2000, knowing that even though the group was reponsible for carrying out deadly bombings in the United States, his legacy wouldn’t suffer (even after the 9/11 attacks outraged Americans, Clinton’s pardoning of the FALN terrorists has never really harmed his public image).
On the other hand, I assume if George W. Bush pardoned Michael Griffin that this would quickly become a defining incident of his presidency.
California’s Proposition 8 and the Double-Edged Sword of Judicial Activism
The Los Angeles Times ran an interesting story last week analyzing why Proposition 8 passed in California. Among other things, the story highlights the strategy by Proposition 8 supporters of trumpeting the alleged long-term effects of allowing gay marriage above and beyond the fact of the marriages themselves,
They were able to focus the debate on their assertion that without the ban, public school children would be indoctrinated into accepting gay marriage against their parents’ wishes, churches would be sanctioned for not performing same-sex weddings and the institution of marriage would be irreparably harmed.
Supporters of gay marriage, along with political leaders including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-San Francisco) and the state’s superintendent of public instruction, denounced those messages as scare tactics, but they were not able to sway voters. Preliminary returns showed Proposition 8 passing 52% to 48%.
Repeatedly opponents of Proposition 8 said the idea that courts would force churches to perform same sex marraiges was absurd. But is it really any more absurd that a future court might require churches to perform same sex marraiges than it was that the California Supreme Court found a right to gay marriage in the state’s constitution to begin with?
After all, at one time it was probably considered absurd that courts would require Catholic charities Catholic Charities of Sacramento to cover birth control for their employees, but in 2004 the California Supreme Court ruled that, in fact, they were legally obligated to do so.
Or switch the positions here. In 2004, Michigan was one of 11 states that passed ballot initiatives banning gay marriage. One of the arguments that opponents of that ban made in Michigan was that the ban would have far-reaching effects including making it illegal for government agencies to offer health care benefits, etc. to domestic partners of gays and lesbians. Proponents of the ban ridiculed that claim and said all the initiative would do was ban marriage.
But in 2007, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that all domestic partner benefits (whether for heterosexual or homosexual couples) was unconstitutional under the marriage ban language, and earlier this year the Michigan Supreme Court agreed.
That’s the problem with this wave of judicial activism, whether it be for conservative or liberal purposes — it creates a great deal of uncertainty so that claims that a piece of legislation will or will not have a specific effects are largely meaningless.
Would the California Supreme Court require churches to marry gay couples? Almost certainly not, but who is to really say in an era of judicial activism on all sides.