Monday, October 09, 2006

This is your brain. This is your brain on sin.


"Again you have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'Do not take a false oath, but make good to the Lord all that you vow.'

But I say to you, do not swear at all; not by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.

Do not swear by your head, for you cannot make a single hair white or black.

Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Anything more is from the evil one."


-- Matthew 5:33-37



If you require proof that not even a hurricane of biblical proportions can provide an "attitude adjustment" for some people, let us coinsider this recent dispatch from the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

BATON ROUGE -- The process House members use to change their votes after a
bill passes or fails is lax and needs to be improved, House Clerk Alfred "Butch"
Speer told a legislative panel Wednesday.

Speer told the House Committee on House and Governmental Affairs, the panel
that oversees the daily mechanics of how the chamber operates, that he or his
staff received requests for "more than 500 vote changes" from House members at
the last legislative session. "That is remarkable," he said.

Speer, the House chief record-keeper and administrative officer, said some of
the requests for vote changes in the recent session were written on "little cube
pieces of paper. . . . It is too easy, in my opinion" to change a
vote.

Speer said one member approached him during this year's session with more
than a dozen recorded votes and asked him to change them to show the lawmaker
had voted for or against bills even though he was absent from the
chamber.

The practice of vote-changing has increased over the years. He said when he
became clerk 24 years ago, allowing a House member to change a vote was a
rarity.

Under existing procedure, a House member must inform Speer of a desire to
change a vote, get routine permission of the House to do it, and the vote is
changed. The Senate does not allow a member to change a vote after a final vote
is taken, but if a senator mistakenly votes a certain way, he or she can submit
a form to Senate officials to include in the official Senate journal attesting
to the error.

In theory, Speer said, a House member can cast a vote on the first day of a
session and ask to have it changed just before adjournment on the last day of
the same session.

Speer recommended that House members who want to change their votes submit a
signed form to him or his staff making the request, a document that would be a
public record. "We would formalize the process a little more this way," he
said.

Ah, but it gets better, my children! Again, from the Times-Picayune:

Rep. M.J. "Mert" Smiley, R-St. Amant, complained that the letters seeking
permission to change a vote could be used against a lawmaker by a campaign
opponent and would make it easier for reporters to follow who changes votes
and on which issues.

Rep. Smiley is either more of an honest man than his policy position -- such as it is -- would indicate, or he is dumb even by Louisiana Legislature standards.

Your benevolent Favog, however, was born and raised in Louisiana. Let me assure you; it's the latter. As we often said in the Gret Stet -- usually just before loading the U-Haul and aiming it toward the state line -- "Oy veh!"

With the accidental release of honesty emissions from Baton Rouge committee chambers nowadays, it is easy to see why the state ethics board put this on the agenda:

G30. Docket No. 06-699
Consideration of a request for an advisory opinion concerning the regulation of web-blogs (sic) and blog sites and the placement of political campaign signs.

What? And not newspapers and TV, too? If Louisiana public servants were as competent as they are venal, we'd have big problems "way down yonder." As in Saddam Bros. on the Bayou. (OK, not all Louisiana pols and bureaucrats are petty, ill-willed or crooked. But enough are, and Louisianians have a long history of not having a problem with that.)

George Bush would be trying to justify an invasion. And he'd probably be right this time.

Listen, Katrina was horrific. So was Hurricane Rita. That the feds can't build a decent levee is worse. (That FEMA is incompetent is par for the course.) And the Mighty Favog understands that it's a bitch being, basically, high-functioning Third World.

But if you're gonna take our tax money to build back what was laid waste, is it really too much to ask that you follow our Constitution? Particularly that whole First Amendment Thang.

Oy veh, indeed. It's true, there is no place like Nebraska . . . .

(Hat tip: The Dead Pelican, Emily Metzgar)

No comments: