What Kind Of Asshole Conservative Response Did You Have?

via Pandagon:

It's like a Livejournal quiz...only without the quiz part. You get to decide what kind of asshole conservative response you'd have to Hurricane Katrina!

Religious Conservative
God hates faggots and the rich white unmarried college kids who travel down to the French Quarter every year to drink, carouse, and deposit various genital secretions on or in each other. Thus, he killed a bunch of straight black people with families.

Economic Conservative
New Orleans was destroyed because it was a pitiful welfare state, the root cause of which was a mixture of the endemic nature of black people to rely on Big Daddy government coupled with the endemic nature of liberals to prey on black people. This explains their reluctance to pay $5 for a waterlogged Twinkie - years of socialism have stained their ability to understand that market economics require the fucking over of black people during emergencies, lest the government actually help them and turn their children into welfare-loving parasites. Gay welfare-loving parasites.

Cultural Conservative
The race pimps and hustlers keep saying this is about race. It isn't. It's about niggers being too stupid to move out of the way of the storm.

Faux-Moderate Conservatives
We're in the midst of a crisis here - there's plenty of blame to go around. We'll apportion Democrats' now and the rest to Republicans when New Orleans is rebuilt...in 2025.

Compassionate Conservatives
Finally, Katrina has done what years of government intervention couldn't - herd all the poor black people into a giant stadium where they can be dealt with by giant trucks of crap from Wal*Mart. Where's my firefighter calendar?

'Cause you just had to see this coming...

Activist judges?

Judges refusing to hear abortion petitions

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A pregnant teenager went to the county courthouse in Memphis early this summer, saying she wanted an abortion. The Circuit Court judge refused to hear the case and said he would recuse himself from any others like it.

"Taking the life of an innocent human being is contrary to the moral order," the judge, John McCarroll of Shelby County Circuit Court, wrote in June. "I could not in good conscience make a finding that would allow the minor to proceed with the abortion."

The teenager was in court because Tennessee, as with 18 other states, requires minors to get a parent's permission before they can have an abortion. But the state also allows another option: The teenagers can ask a judge for permission to decide for themselves.

Judges, however, are starting to opt out. Other judges of the Shelby Circuit Court have recused themselves like McCarroll, and now, according to one judge, only four of the nine judges on the court hear such abortion applications.

Judges in Alabama and Pennsylvania also have said they will not take such cases.

The actions, similar in some ways to pharmacists' refusal to dispense drugs related to contraception or abortion, have set off a debate about the responsibilities of judges and the consequences of such recusals, including political ones when judges are elected rather than appointed.

McCarroll's decision prompted 12 experts on judicial ethics to write to the Tennessee Supreme Court in late August. The experts called his action lawless and said they feared his approach could spread through the nation and to subjects such as the death penalty, medical marijuana, flag burning and divorce.

"Unwillingness to follow the law is not a legitimate ground for recusal," the letter said.

[...]

"I didn't swear to uphold all of the laws of Tennessee except for X, Y and Z," Bailey said. "You're sworn to uphold the law whether you agree with it or not."

[...]

Professor Susan Koniak, who teaches legal ethics at Boston University and signed the letter to the Tennessee Supreme Court, said judges were free to express moral disagreement with a law but were not free to decline to enforce it.

"I expect them to bring their moral sense to a case," Koniak said in an interview. "But the law comes first."

The clusterfuck continues

via BoingBoing

( A Boing Boing reader who owns an environmental cleanup services company -- and asks to remain anonymous here -- says, )

It's funny, 'cause it's true

The Real Aristocrats