While politics can certainly be a contact sport, even the nastiest of campaigns could actually be worse. I was recently daydreaming about what a campaign would be like if politicians simply blurted out what they really think – or what our imaginations tell us they might really think.

Here, then, is a fictional three-way debate between the remaining GOP and Democratic presidential candidates, with Tim Russert as moderator. Since this is a complete fabrication from my sometimes-twisted brain, I did not want to take front page space from the real stuff.  So if you are interested, you’ll have to jump to read more. Those of you who already know you’d hate it, or who aren’t interested in (attempts at) satire, you are spared this insult to your consciousness.

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Sometimes, there is nothing else to say except it doesn’t get any better than this.  In 2006, the voters of the state of Michigan firmly approved a state constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of racial preferences in admissions to institutions of higher education.  The campaign was full of rancor, deceit and flamboyant hyperbole.  The primary and most visible opponent was an organization named Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary or BAMN for merciful brevity.

It seems BAMN decided to file a federal lawsuit in the court of a sympathetic, Clinton-appointed district judge, David Lawson.  The University of Michigan, subject of a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling on racial discrimination in 2003, quietly agreed to go along with the BAMN lawsuit even though they disapproved of BAMN’s somewhat un-academic antics and tactics.  Judge Lawson sought and found ways to keep hope alive for opponents of the Amendment and, while doing so, incurred the wrath of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, who stayed his order to suspend compliance with the will of the voters while litigation proceeded.

BAMN and Lawson were succeeding in their plan until counsel for a plaintiff in a parallel suit, the Center for Individual Rights, put a California law professor on the stand to testify he had found contradictory and conflicting evidence concerning data provided by the University of Michigan on racial preferences.  This evidence was also used in presenting the earlier case to the U.S. Supreme Court back in 2003.  Faced with the plaintiff’s broad and undeniable claims for extensive discovery of UofM records and data, Judge Lawson and BAMN were confronted with the unraveling not only of the present anti-Amendment case, but also the very real possibility the previous SCOTUS ruling might be vacated should the truth of the school’s perjurious actions and falsified records be publicly revealed.  Lawson did the only thing a left-wing federal judge could do when backed into a corner.  He ruled against his fellow travelers,  the pro-racial quota defendants, in every aspect of the case.  It is too funny when these people are trapped in the web of their own deceit and connivance.

This creates a kind of compounded presidential power phenomenon where the President takes his power not from Congress or constitutional delegation but by the actions of past presidents. This is a line of reasoning that has been accepted by the courts. In particular, courts pay attention to the reaction of Congress to executive orders and if Congress either does not react, or reacts favorably, via appropriates for example, to past executive orders, the court is reticent to hold the most recent promulgation of executive authority unjustified. In other words, when there exists a chain of executive order precedent on an issue, which Congress has not directly opposed, the court is more likely to support the most recent link in that chain.

This foundational presidential power phenomenon can be applied as an argument for executive authority to address climate change because the executive orders issued by previous presidents on this issue may serve, as did those issued by President Kennedy’s predecessors, as a strong foundation for current executive power. For example, a number of executive orders issued in the past thirty years can be used as a foundation for current authority to implement climate change policies by executive order.

Several members of the Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES) in Boulder, Colorado spent more than half of 2007 researching and analyzing ways in which the next President of the United States could utilize executive orders virtually unchecked to implement emergency climate change measures in the first 100 days in office. The CEES is a program of the Law School of the University of Colorado and is affiliated with The Presidential Climate Action Project whose board member, former Senator Gary Hart, holds the Wirth Chair at the University in Denver. The alarming, frightening quotation above is from page 143 of their 217 page report, The Boundaries of Executive Authority and is subtitled, Using Executive Orders to Implement Federal Climate Change Policy. It is a bold, detailed plan for a willing President to enact, without expressed legislative consent or judicial interference, radical emergency measures to drastically alter the American economy and way of life.

We have suffered for seven years the constant hysterical harangue from the Left that George W. Bush has conducted himself like some dictatorial monarch. The irony completely escapes those vocal wretches who now have laid down the roadmap for a new Democratic President to literally invoke emergency powers to reorder our economy and enact regulations which would severely cripple our way of life. The specter exists also a McCain presidency would be tempted by such anti-constitutional larceny. I do not believe the Republican candidate would leave the reservation for such a fool’s folly, but I do allow the possibility survives.

The Presidential Climate Action Project has produced their own master climate policy plan to which the CEES legal strategies serve as a sort of down and dirty handbook to accomplish their goals while neutralizing those irritating American citizens and voters.

Last, but not least, Leslie Carothers, president of the Environmental Law Institute, has editorialized in the Christian Science Monitor about how there should a litmus test for judicial appointees concerning global climate change because the crisis is just too serious for America to be bothered with minor trivialities like the Constitution. There are many people and organizations working day and night to erode your freedoms and liberty. Stay vigilant.

Nota Bene: Other than one small reference by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com, I have found only one small town Colorado newspaper writing about this subject. No reports by any news outlet or blog, conservative or otherwise, have surfaced in my research other than academically-oriented and sympathetic NGO websites on the internet.  I find it alarming no person or organization has picked up this story. This is original reporting by Lone Star Times and while we are glad to provide it, I personally, am alarmed by the fact it continues to ride below the radar of Americans.

I’m thinking that it might be a better idea to make male politicians wear these things.

B. Hussein Obama is disappointing one of his early constituencies.

“It has now been 1,522 days since Obama has been accessible to our community.

“The question is now this: Is he trying to play it safe or has he become a managed candidate? But there’s more to this story.

“We have found that Senator Barack Obama would rather talk at the LGBT community than with it.

“While Senator Hillary Clinton has been accessible to the local LGBT press with numerous “no rules” interviews, Obama simply has not.”

Fear not, GLBT mouthpieces. B. Hussein didn’t get soft when you finally grabbed him.

Mr Obama, a US Senator from Illinois, said he supports a repeal of a law that bars openly gay, lesbian and bisexual people from serving in the country’s Armed Forces and is hopeful it can be achieved.

Senator Obama also told the magazine that he would sign into law workplace protections for LGB people and would like to include trans protections, though he acknowledged that might be more difficult to get through Congress.

For those of you who don’t know “trans” refers to “transgendered” individuals. And yes, I suspect legislation like that would be more difficult to get through Congress.

Those of you who were mad at Iowans for giving Mike Huckabee a leg up early in the Republican presidential primary should cut them some slack. After all, they had the guts to force their lawmakers to pass an English only law and last week a judge ruled that multi-lingual forms must be removed from the Secretary of State’s website.

District Judge Douglas Staskal ruled in favor of U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who sued state officials last year, contending they were violating the state’s English-language law. He brought the suit against Gov. Chet Culver, who previously served as secretary of state, and Mauro, contending they had placed illegal voting forms on the secretary of state’s Web site.

Non-English voter forms were removed from the state’s Web site late Thursday afternoon.

One small step for state gov’t., one giant leap for state unity.

Now, if we could just get these conservative lawmakers in red state Texas to see the light.

Actor, Harvard graduate, and Al Gore roommate Tommy Lee Jones weighs in on the border.

Speaking of borders, all the Republican presidential candidates supported building a fence along the border to keep Mexicans from crossing illegally. Mitt Romney advocated repatriating millions of Mexicans. Are those viable ideas?
The idea of a fence between El Paso and Brownsville bears all the credibility and seriousness of flying saucers from Mars or leprechauns. Or any manner of malicious, paranoid superstition. In other words, it’s bull%$#@.

But you hear the talk.
And the talk is worth headlines, the talk is worth attention, and that might lead to votes. It’s a predatory approach to democracy by those who would instill fear and then propose themselves as a solution. It’s very destructive. Very, very destructive. And it’s the perfectly wrong thing to do.

First of all, it won’t work. You can’t build a fence that I cannot get over, through, or under if I want to go to Mexico. In that [border] country, you cannot do it. It’s a complete folly. Ecologically, it’s a complete disaster, and sociologically, it’s a complete disaster. It’s an act of fascist madness.

And the people who are being appealed to, the voterships that are removed from that country, are being spoken to as if it’s time to fence their backyard so the stray dog doesn’t get in. “OK, let’s just build a fence.” That’s as far removed from reality as can be, and entirely cynical by those who would manipulate these people. It’s a sad day for the democratic process to see people manipulated through fear and insecurity.

In the film, the act of bringing Melquiades Estrada’s body home for his final burial is really an act of love.
It’s kind of metaphorical. It’s not a simple movie.

But the idea of sending Mexicans home by the millions is really an act of hate.
It is—and fear and prejudice and bigotry. You know, we’ve been treated this way by people in the North for a long time. I don’t think they’re going to change their minds and do anything different.

Well then. Turns out that ol’ Tommy Lee doesn’t think too much of the average American. You see, he made himself a movie about an illegal that gets killed and his friend that gets revenge by kidnapping the killer, making him unearth the body, then taking both back to Mexico via horseback.

Let’s talk about Three Burials.
I think it’s a good film. I mean, I know it is. [But] I often wondered, sitting around what we called video village—where the feedback comes out of the camera—I’d look at what we were doing and shake my head and ask the script girl, “Do you think there’s anybody in the United States smart enough to see this movie?”

Probably not Tommy. You spent $15 million to make it and Americans spent $5 million at the box office to see it.

I think Americans are smarter than you think.

Now be totally honest. You do have a boyfriend don’t you.

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