The default reaction to the Rave bust in Utah from a number of people has been of the form "blah, blah, Republicans, blah, blah, Bush, blah, blah, Police State." This is more then a little annoying. Raves have been targetted federally by a bipartisan coallition led by Democrats. Yes, Virginia, Democrats have jack boots too.

In 2002 Democratic senators Biden, Leahy, and Durbin along with Republicans Grassley and Hatch proposed the Rave Act of 2002. Biden was the primary sponsor.

This law included a findings section, essentially a list of justifications, which is basically a collection of paranoid rantings that have little or no connection to reality. For example:

Many rave promoters go to great lengths to try to portray their events as alcohol-free parties that are safe places for young adults to go to dance with friends, and some even go so far as to hire off-duty, uniformed police officers to patrol outside of the venue to give parents the impression that the event is safe.

There is no way they might actually have a legitimate interest in hiring security guards!

Because rave promoters know that Ecstasy causes the body temperature in a user to rise and as a result causes the user to become very thirsty, many rave promoters facilitate and profit from flagrant drug use at rave parties or events by selling over-priced bottles of water and charging entrance fees to 'chill-rooms' where users can cool down.

You'd think maybe people who were dancing at an all night party would, you know, not want to drink a lot of alcohol, need bottles of water, and want to chill out, irrespective of whether or not they were on drugs, wouldn't you? Furthermore, I've been to a LOT of raves and I have never ever seen a separate fee charged for access to a chill room!

Apparently Leahy and Durbin dropped their cosponsorship, possibly when they started getting angry faxes. But Biden pushed on. He was joined by Presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and everyone's favorite Democratic Senator, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The thing was rolled up into s.151, an omnibus protect the children law that, among many other things, calls for 2-4 year prison terms for anyone who puts sexually explicit material on a "misleading" internet domain name. It is now law.

Now, yeah, people do drugs at Raves. Some aspects of the rave culture are drug related. However, the same thing can be said of any pop culture in the past 50-80 years including Rock, Jazz, HipHop, etc... These laws don't target drugs specifically. They target Raves. They specifically target culture.

When I left Atlanta in the late 90s there was a vibrant rave culture in the city with a real community that corrdinated online and threw parties. Its completely gone. There is nothing left but a few high priced clubs that play similar music. This website stub is all thats left of a once vibrant mailing list of people who threw parties on a regular basis that I participated in for years. The police wiped it out. They wiped out a culture. They did it with strong support from the Democrats.

Yep, the left side of the fence is guilty on lots of things like this. People forget that the PMRC came out of Tipper Gore. They've done all sorts of other stupid things too. Political Correctness came from the left. Hillary is currently leading the screaming about GTA:SA. None of those was a good thing. No one is especially innocent when it comes to the culture fight.

FOXNews.com - Views - Straight Talk - Raving Lunacy

The survey also found that teens who say they watch three or more R-rated movies in a typical month — about 43 percent — are seven times likelier to smoke cigarettes and six times likelier to try alcohol than teens who do not watch R-rated movies.

The correlation between R-rated movie watching and the risk of substance-abuse remains even after controlling for age, the report said. This was the first time the annual survey asked about R-rated movies.

I'm just waiting for some dumbass politico to jump on this. Why not see if there is something else going on that gives access to the movies, like I don't know, parents who don't pay any damn attention to their kids? I'd be willing to bet that the group in this quote from the article,

The report found that teens who confided in their parents were at much lower risk of drug abuse than teens who turn first to another adult.

and the group watching the movies, has virtually no match up.

Want to keep your kids off drugs? Spend more time talking to them and less time bitching about how all the "evil" things in the world are trying to get your kids hooked.

Survey Finds Fewer Drug-Free Schools

Wiccan parents MAY teach their children their religion, a court of Appeals ruled in Indiana. It is crazy to me that the court of appeals ever had to hear this case in the first place!

Did you forget this is Jesusland?

Court limits on parent's faith limited

When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.

Yuck.

Can't teach religion as part of public school? Fine, recast it as history. Can't teach Creationism in science? Toss it over to the social studies department. The really sad thing is that if they actually taught it as history, it would be worthwhile.

I had a history class where for part of it we did look at the bible, and used what was in there as compared to the archeological record, and other time relavant sources. That was actually interesting. We also read Gilgamesh in the same class. That I'd call appropriate. I'm sure you could build an entire course around the concept.

From the account here, they've built an indoctriation class and are hiding it as history. It has no more business in a school than the less than pseudo-science of creationism, and I'd like the people responsible for it flogged in the public square for doing something that deliberately contributes to the ignorance and stupidity of the next generation.

Bible Course Becomes a Test for Public Schools in Texas

ibenez wrote:

Neoteric wrote:

Mike the Usurper wrote:

Bush said in June 2004 that he would fire anyone in his administration shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. On Monday, however, he added the qualifier that it would have be shown that a crime was committed.

So now you need to have done something more than be unethical and harmful to the nation, you need to have done so criminally? I suppose that's fair, since holding by the earlier standard the changes in White House appointee payroll would have made a significant dent in the deficit...

This is the most clear example of this administration protecting it's own and not holding itself accountable to the American people. This administration is externalizing it's failures to the media. That's not right and not what we need in goverment leadership.

So then should BJ Clinton have quit after lying under oath which is a crime? BJ had to question the meaning of the word "is" for pete's sake.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on why BJ Clinton wasn't fired AFTER being found guilty of lying under oath before I entertain the notion of Satan (I mean Rove) being fired.

My response to this is that I don't have any sympathy for what Clinton in that regard either. I understand WHY he did it, and what he did there was not different than any other guy who gets caught with his hand in the cookie box, but doesn't want to end up in divorce court.

The question is, "what was he lying about?" Clinton was lying about not getting a little, in a civil proceeding funded by folks on the other side of the aisle (the Paula Jones case). The proceedings there were not because anyone had, or may have, broken the law, they were there because somebody thought that it would be a great way to score points on a sitting president by going after him as a philanderer.

I am going to say uncategorically, the people involved in that operation and this one are nothing short of treasonous. Their actions in both cases have acted to harm the security of this nation.

In the Jones case it prevented Clinton from taking actions that should have been taken because they would have caused aditional political problems. The Lewinski scandal manufactured by the disloyal opposition meant that operations against Al-Qaeda in the 90's did not happen. If they had, the disloyal opposition would have used that as further ammunition saying that this had been done to distract attention from the personal problems. Their actions stopped operations that could have stopped Bin Ladin in 1998 and 9/11 would have never happened.

In the current case of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby exposing a covert operative, they have done DIRECT harm to the intelligence gathering abilities of the United States. Prior to this exposure, she was in a per... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Bush: Any Criminals in Leak to Be Fired

Romanpoet wrote:
] "This site is dedicated to spreading the Gospel in the
] werewolf and furry communities. It is my hope that many
] trans-species people will accept Jesus as their Savior through
] this ministry. "

and the best part, aside from his young earth psuedo-science bullshit is that he ends each page with:

Love you. God Bless.

Molatar Seth Pyrargent.
Dragon, Evangelist, Ranger.

bea-ti-ful.

I think if there's ever a "WTF?" category, this should be the first thing linked there. I'm wondering if someone should forget about Jesus and get back on the lithium...

RE: Molatar's Castle