Rep. Bucher: The relentless fly in the GOP soup

Rep. Susan Bucher has been awake since 5 a.m., marking up bills with highlighters. Yellow means bad. Pink means really bad.

It has been a really bad morning.

Six hours later, Bucher is in her office, still going.

"This is my problem area," she says, pointing at papers on her desk. "This pile right here is something I have been working on, and that's CSX railroad in Orlando. And this is another project that's on fire. It just doesn't smell right."

Not much has sat right with Bucher since she was elected eight years ago to the Florida House. No one else has asked more questions, investigated more issues and agitated more colleagues than her. (Click here for the profile. Also, listen to audio clips.)

Comments

[Bubba Mark]

Having known Rep. Bucher for about 10 years I have been one of those people who everytime Rep. Bucher asks a question on either the House Floor or in Committee and will roll my eyes wondering what the hell she is going to ask why she even bothers, but the bottom line she is good for the Legislative Process.

In addition people judge her character by her actions on the floor or in committee, but go outside the Capitol and talk to her, or have a beer with her and you will be surprised that she is one of the nicest people to be around!

I know it isn't the popular opinion especially coming from a Republican, but I will miss the hell out of Susan Bucher and I wish her the best of luck!

She can be annoying - but she has one quality the Republican leadership lacks - integrity. She actually reads the bills & amendments, reads the bill analyses, and does her research.

Most members just read the title - then find out how leadership and/or the lobbyists who gave to their campaign wants them to vote.

[Donald Lance]

U go girl!

No I'm sorry. I disagree thoroughly. As a House staffer, I find her tactics to be repulsive. She does the things she does not simply because of the citizens she represents, but equally as much so to embarrass and humiliate Republicans. Her disdain for authority in the House is why I for one will not shed a single tear when she gives her long-awaited goodbye speech. And be assured that any clapping for her will be simply because she is finally almost gone!

She's cocky, arrogant, nasty (sometimes even to her own Dem colleagues) and does nothing to further her own cause by running her frigging mouth on EVERY...SINGLE....ISSUE.

Good riddance, Susan. And I speak for everyone in Tallahassee when I say we hope you get absolutely crushed in that Supervisor of Elections race later this year...

[cynical idealist]

I've met, had dinner with and have gotten, sort of, to know Susan Bucher. She is a nice person and even a hard core conservative friend of mine likes her.

That said, she's a bulldog on issues and wants people of modest means, who have little or no voice, treated fairly in the process...For 7:58, the staffer who finds her reulsive, you're not paid to have an opinion, so please shut your pie hole.

As far as the story goes, Steve Bosquet, arguably the best reporter at the Capitol, made a mistake with the following....

If anything, she makes representatives understand the legislation that bears their names, but is often crafted by a lobbyist.

Anyone invovled in the process knows legislation is rarely written by a single lobbyist. It may begin that way, but by the time it hits the committee process, it'll be amended by other lobbyists who represent opposing views.

And, yes, I too find her nasal voice and attack dog persona tiring. But, even Susan Bucher has a place in the process, unlike the lemmings who simply follow leadership into the sea...

[cynical idealist]

I've met, had diner with and have gotten, sort of, to know Susan Bucher. She is a nice person and even a hard core conservative friend of mine likes her.

That said, she's a bulldog on issues and wants people of modest means, who have little or no voice, treated fairly in the process...For the staffer who finds her reulsive, you're not paid to have an opinion, so shut your pie hole.

As far as the story goes, Steve Bosquet, arguably the best reporter at the Capitol, made a mistake with the following....

If anything, she makes representatives understand the legislation that bears their names, but is often crafted by a lobbyist.

Legislation is rarely written by a single lobbyist...it may begin that way, but by the time it hits the committee process, it'll be amended by other lobbyists who represent opposing views.

[Polk County Democrats for Dockery]

Bucher is against CSX? Now I know it's a good deal!!!

[Donald Lance]

7:58! If you call representing the people repugnant, then maybe it is YOU who should leave Tally! Trust me when I say we, the people, will not shed a tear when the big doors hit you on the way out. Now get back to work fixing what what the people demm to be broken and quit wasting our money on frivolous bills that mean nothing to the people.

[CSX Brass]

Now if we could only get Bucher to argue against CSX on the floor, it would be a SURE thing.

[red]

Interesting. We in Palm Beach County have had to grit our teeth and smile for 8 long years. It's true that Susan is smart and thorough. What she failed to learn is that when you are equally obnoxious about EVERYTHING, people stop listening, even when your idea has merit. Her hyper-partisanship would make her the worst possible SOE, since she defines "fairness" as whatever is right in her own inflated opinion. Wish us well, Tally. At least your time with her is almost over.

[Hernando County GOP]

Bucher is the Paula Dockery of the House.

[toxic democrats]

Part 1: Privacy and Property

The word "privacy" cannot be found in either the Declaration of Independence or in the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The word "private" occurs only once in these documents -- in the Fifth Amendment where it modifies "property." Nevertheless, there is a right to privacy in the Constitution; and, contrary to recent Supreme Court logic, the right to privacy is guaranteed, not by some shadowy and ethereal "penumbra," it is guaranteed, and can only be guaranteed, by the right to property. Recent Supreme Court decisions, which have ignored the inextricable connection between the right to privacy and the right to property, imperil both of these rights.

The Fifth Amendment, which deals with the legal concepts of the grand jury, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, due process and eminent domain, was written as a response to and as protection from the abuses that the American colonists had suffered under British rule. The Revolutionary War was not just about taxation and representation. The British had set up special courts whose judges (and, often, juries) were Tories. These courts ignored Colonial law and served at the will and for the bidding of the Crown. The British army not only entered private homes without warrants, it confiscated private homes for quartering its troops. The Fifth Amendment was written to prevent these kinds of abuses by the new government.[1]

The Fifth Amendment could have been written by a German philosopher. It consists of a single run-on sentence that is 108 words in length - the longest sentence in the Constitution. It begins "No person shall..." and then describes who can be held and tried how many times in which court for what. When we get to the last two clauses of the amendment we read (remember it starts: "No person shall..."): "... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. (Italics mine.)

Notice in that first clause, called "the due process clause," that property is put on a par with life and liberty. The government cannot kill us or put us in jail or take our property unless it follows specific legal procedures. The second clause ("eminent domain") declares that the government cannot take our property unless it pays us for our property and unless it puts that property to public use.

Furthermore, the word "nor," the first word of the eminent domain clause, is meant to be inclusive. In other words, the government must follow the strictures of both the due process clause and eminent domain clause before it can take private property.

The reasoning behind this part of the Fifth Amendment is not German philosophy; it is British philosophy; specifically, it is the philosophy of John Locke. Most of the founders had read Locke's Two Treatises Concerning Civil Government. The idea behind the introductory quote above from Benjamin Franklin was taken directly from Locke's Second Treatise, Section 138, which reads, in part:

Men, therefore, in a society having property, they have such a right to goods, which by the law of the community are theirs, that nobody hath a right to take them, or any part of them, from them without their consent; without this they have no property at all. For I have truly no property in that which another can by right take from me when he please against my consent. Hence it is a mistake to think that the supreme or legislative power of any commonwealth can do what it will, and dispose of the estates of the subject arbitrarily, or a take any part of them at pleasure.

This idea was not limited to "Jeffersonians." The Federalist, Number 54, which was probably written by Alexander Hamilton, states:

Government is instituted no less for protection of property, than of the persons, of individuals. The one as well as the other, therefore, may be considered as represented by those who are charged with the government.

There are at least four reasons property rights were protected by the founding fathers. Property provides four things for the owner: (1) Security. A home is a shelter from the elements and from hostile others. (2) Income. The farmer's field and the merchant's shop are the focus of their labor and the source of their income. (3) Personal identity. Each of us differentiates ourselves from others by the personal and real properties we chose to purchase. Property helps define us: we are what we buy. Farmer's buy farmland. Merchants buy shops. People buy goods that are expressions of their personalities and their lifestyles. (4) Privacy. What we do within the walls of our home is, pretty much, whatever we chose to do. It follows that the government's protection of my property is also the protection of my security, my income, my identity, and my privacy.

What happens when we step outside of our home or business and enter the public realm? In this sphere, security is provided by the police (and, once upon a time, by the Second Amendment). Income is protected by the government's enforcement of contract law. (If I work for someone else on their property, I enter into a contract with that person for my wages.) Personal identity, at least in terms of its expression through the purchase of property, is protected by the free exchange of goods and services. (I can buy a mink coat for my wife in spite of PETA's protestations.)

But what of privacy? How can the government protect our privacy once we step outside of the home? Or can the government even protect our privacy in public? In order to answer these questions we must first be able to define, in specific terms, what privacy is.

CAN IT BE ANY CLEARER TO THE LUMPEN:

save for a few -- maybe a single piglican -- they want you to be dumb!!

if you LUMPEN actualy got an ejukashn, you would no longer be among those singing the praises of jebbathefatt, his drunkenlying brother and the rest of that pack of liarsdrunksclosetedhomosexualsandthieves who have been whoring for the wealthy and the priviliged for years and years.

as it stands today, they hand you a doo-doo sandwich and you smile and say, "thank you! that was best ever! may i have another?"

while YOU get what you DESERVE, why DO you have to drag the rest of us thru the SEPTIC SYSTEM with you!!

She is the hemorrhoid of the Florida House.

[toxic leaders]

What Has Gone Wrong?

In the early 1960s a married Connecticut couple visited their local Planned Parenthood office and asked for advice on contraception. They were given a prescription for contraceptives. Connecticut had a law at that time which prohibited the use of contraceptives. In 1965 the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, held the Connecticut law unconstitutional.

The majority opinion in Griswold, written by Justice William O. Douglas, is, perhaps, the most bizarre instance of reason gone mad in the history of the Court. Remember, the word "privacy" appears nowhere in the Constitution and the word "private" appears only in the Fifth Amendment. Justice Douglas, however, found a right to "privacy" everywhere - except in the last two clauses of the Fifth Amendment.[8]

Where does the right to privacy come from? According to Douglas, "...specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy."

Here is what Douglas asserted - translated in to plain English: The rights guaranteed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution have shadows around their edges. These specific rights give off a gas-like substance that affects their shadows by giving at least some shadows life. These gases make at least one shadow (the right to privacy) a real and living thing.

This is palpable metaphysical nonsense. It reminds me of the 18th century German mystic Emanuel Swedenborg:

"In addition, there exist spiritual spheres of life that emanate from each and every angel and envelop them. By means of these emanations one can discern, even at a distance, what each angel is like, because these spheres flow out of the emanations into each individual's life..."[9]

According to Swedenborg, human morality emanates, like a gas, from our guardian angels. According to Douglas, the right to privacy emanates, like a gas, from the Constitution.[10]

After Griswold, the Court's decisions about and reflections on "privacy" flow like tea from a kettle at an endless party with Alice in Wonderland. Claptrap reigns in the ether emanating from the Court's penumbra. Privacy is everywhere and nowhere and never where it really belongs - as a logical appurtenance of the right of property.

We have been treated to such prattle as Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), in which the Court, pouring another cup of tea (and baldly stating "we have no doubt as to the correctness of [Griswold]"), wrote:

These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.[11]

It is hard to believe these words were written by educated adults - let alone members of the most important judicial body in the world. Take that last sentence. It cannot possibly be true that there is a right "to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe." If I had a right to define the meaning of "meaning" and you had a right to define the meaning of "meaning," you and I would never be able to talk to each other.

Pass the tea and switch chairs. In Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), Justice Kennedy favorably cited the exact passage just quoted from Planned Parenthood (part of the ever expanding gas of Griswold) in order to legitimize sodomy. If it is true that there "is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," then everything is legal and everything is permitted. Friedrich Nietzsche called this "nihilism."

As the "right to privacy" emanates farther and farther into the ether, the right to property shrinks with each new Court ruling. It started with Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26. In 1945 a large portion of Washington, D.C. was, essentially, a shantytown occupied by a large population of black Americans. Parts of this community were visible from the Capitol. Conditions were bad - but not nearly as deplorable as most of the hundreds of other black shantytowns which dotted the southern states.[12] The United States Congress, unable to endure the view from its porch, set up a five member commission, the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency, with orders to rid the area of "blighting factors or causes of blight." Over 5,000 poor people, most of them black, were evicted from their homes and apartments. Only a fraction of the land was put to public use. The government sold most of it to land developers.

Having conquered the poor, the government next went after the rich. In the late 60's, the State of Hawaii set up yet another commission. It determined that, combined, the state and federal governments owned 49% of the total land of the Hawaiian Islands and that some 72 families owned most of the remainder (nearly 47% of the total). Responding to those numbers, the State of Hawaii passed Land Reform Act of 1967. The law forced the 72 families to divest themselves of huge chunks of property by allowing persons renting portions of these properties to petition the state government to have the property condemned. The lessees could then buy the property. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hawaii's law in Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 US 229 (1984). Land was literally taken from its owners, condemned, and then sold to its renters. Neither the State of Hawaii, nor the U.S. government were required to sale anything.

Having ousted the poor and divested the rich, all that remained between the state and state control of property was the middle class. Surely we were safe. The government would never take our river front homes and sell them to, say, a giant pharmaceutical company. Would it?

The Court, in Midkiff, did offer a promise in a proviso: "A purely private taking could not withstand the scrutiny of the public use requirement; it would serve no legitimate purpose of government and would thus be void."[13] In Kelo et.al. v. City of New London et.al, 545 U.S. 469, (2005) that promise was broken.

A few years ago, Fort Trumbull was a quiet middle class neighborhood on the Thames River in New London, Connecticut. Pfizer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies began building a new research center on the edge of town. The city of New London did not set up a new commission - it recalled an old one - the New London Development Corporation. This was a private corporation.

The New London Development Corporation recommended acquiring fifteen privately owned homes on the bank of the river and turning the land into a parking lot, small shopping mall and luxury hotel - all for the benefit of Pfizer. The city argued, not that the area was "blighted," but that the city's economy was "depressed." The land would yield more tax revenues if the 15 families that lived in those river front homes were sent packing. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed and our homes (middle class homes) will be torn down and the property sold to Pfizer and other business interests.

The Fifth Amendment has been turned on its head. Remember it says, "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. Every word of this amendment was violated in Kelo. Private property was taken for the very specific purpose of private use. Pfizer is not a branch of government. And compensation can never be just if there is no due process of law.[14] After Kelo there is no right to property guaranteed by the state.

The "privacy" party goes on and on in Wonderland. The right to property has disappeared like the Cheshire cat - without the smile.

Tallahasse staff has way too much power and feel free to talk too much. shut your pie hole staffie. How dare you put down someone who speaks up for the people? She represents me and I like the way she does it. Sorry it causes you more work. Get rid of term limits so these kids who hang aroung to feel important get kicked behind the knees! Please lets let the elected official stay in office for 12 years that way you are not picking Presidents and Speakers before they even get elected. People of Florida wake up!!

[red]

Holy cow. You dems are so miserable! And how interesting that one of you used "closeted homosexuals" as a pejorative against Republicans. Hmmm. Another closeted bigot masquerading as a morally superior lib. You guys really need to get a life--especially Prof. Toxic. You must be aching for an audience but you won't find one here.

Bucher rocks. Somebody has to keep an eye on things up there, and at least call bulls-it when something stinks.

Anybody that says she's done anything productive is full of it. That woman is so marginalized, that anything she speaks on automatically galvanizes the opposition.

Susan Bucher should know that the only thing shes done in 9 legislative sessions is suck up oxygen. I just hope and pray for the people of south Florida that she loses that supervisor of elections post and goes home to make her husband as miserable as she makes us.

[Donald Lance]

hey Toxic! I think the Supreme Court already ruled on what is considered "Privacy". It had to deal with these celebs who want to speak out against the US because they don't like to be followed around. They ruled that anything taking place outside, in the open, is fair game. You cannot expect privacy when you are among the public. If you want privacy, stay inside, don't post theses on a public site, and don't talk on open lines of communication. Your post will not change the laws of privacy, so go have a talk to your doctor, in private, and get some meds for your anti-social disorder so you can go outside.

[Toxic Donald]

you obviously have a very low iq and cannot not see or appreciate the damage done to the constition by the progressive and their liberal activist judges. the constition is only a living constitution to totalitarians who do not want the restrictions a democracy places on unfettered government power. the constition was adopted by referendum and it was breathtaking that in the 1700s the colonies were able to create the most liberal constituting document in the world and the states liberally opened up the voting to the previously disenfranchised, including free men and in some states women. they further allowed for the document to be amended and throught the amendment process is it a living document, not byt the fact that you have Justice Gisburg deciding what it should be without any democratic input whatsoever.

Adieu.

Anti-Venon.

[I Know]

Susan Bucher represents the best of Tallahassee. She can be annoying and stubborn and has never learned to pick her fights, but there is no one person who has more fortitude than she. Whether confronting the Republican leadership or her own party, she speaks her mind and there are few in the state capitol that can lay claim to that. I have been against her more times than not but the legislative process will be poorer without her.

[teacher]

I never heard of her before, but it sounds like she missed her calling. She would make a great invesigative reporter and there is apparently a shortage of reporters willing to read through all the legislation and analyze the consequences.

7:58 is obviously a staffer in the Majority Office, big surprise.

The point missed by all here is that, even with her hard work and reading of all bills, when she speaks...no one listens. She is that neighbor who has an opinion on everything and all you hear when she talks is that teacher in the Charlie Brown shows...wah-wah-wah. She may have content to add but when you are the annoying "fly" as you describe here, that is all you become, annoying.

Good riddance!

[Integrity]

Bucher represents the type of politician that Tallahassee needs. She maintained her integrity as a hard worker, a straight shooter, and a person who spoke for the under privileged who get lost in the high stakes games played at the Capitol. As a former staffer for one of the most notorious "personalities" in Tallahassee, I really do feel your pain. However, you must also admit that what I stated above is true, in terms of her tenacity.

For years the Leadership has chipped away at treating the minority with any respect, or dignity (maybe that is the key word with all this?). Rules changes, re-naming committees, and years of last minute language on the floor has decreased patience and decorum and now respect for one another on both sides of the isle is practically gone.

I hope the new leadership and incoming members can find ground to treat one anther with respect - even during the most lively of debates. I can assure you, without that, more fireworks are to come. The new crowd of members arriving in 2009 are extremely talented and smart newbies…the shift is coming very soon.

She even looks like a skinny Paula Dockery (way skinnier).

[Paul D. Harvill]

Rep. Susan Bucher is the shining example of an authentic legislator.

Sure wish we had more like her in the House and Senate.

[Clyde]

Bucher's departure is just the latest evidence of the bankruptcy of the idea of term limits. She has obviously caused a lot of discomfort to the deal makers. That isn't popular, bit it's really needed. Why the voters agreed to term limits is beyond me. It has produced a legislative body whose members become marginally competent only as they are about to leave office. While in office they are at the mercy of long-serving staffers like 7:58 who obviously feels he should be running things. Or they are dependent on lobbyists (who aren't term limited) to "help" them do their jobs. We really know how to put the fun in dysfunctional!

[Paul D. Harvill]

Term limits?

Foolish voters who voted for it are getting what they deserve (and asked for).

[Paul R. Harvill]

Shut up Paul D

[Paul R. Harvill]

She is the hemorrhoid of the Florida House.

[Democrats are Idiots. Bar none.]

Mark Steyn weighs in on the bitter Americans controversy:

61 percent of Americans were optimistic about the future, 29 percent of the French, 15 percent of Germans. Take it from a foreigner: In my experience, Americans are the least “bitter” people in the developed world. Secular, gun-free big-government Europe doesn’t seem to have done anything for people’s happiness. Consider by way of example the words of Keith Reade. He’s not an Obama speechwriter, he’s a writer for the London Daily Mirror. And the day after the 2004 presidential election he expressed his frustration in an alarmingly Obamaesque way:

“Were I a Kerry voter, though, I’d feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets. The self-righteous, gun totin’, military lovin’, sister marryin’, abortion hatin’, gay loathin’, foreigner despisin’, nonpassport ownin’ rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest d*** in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land ‘free and strong.’” Well, that’s certainly why I supported Bush, but I’m not sure it entirely accounts for the other 62,039,073 incontinent rednecks.

Bob Herbert sees some of the same issues in play, though from a different perspective: “Mr. Obama is allowing the Clintons and the news media to craft a damaging persona of him as some kind of weak-kneed brother from another planet, out of touch with mainstream America, and perhaps a loser…The Democrats are doing everything they can to blow this presidential election.” We’ll have to see about that.

[Paul D. Harvill]

IMPOSTORS AT WORK ALREADY:

I don't post for months, and then the venom already drips out:

___________________________

Shut up Paul D

Posted by: Paul R. Harvill | April 19, 2008 at 04:33 PM

___________________________

She is the hemorrhoid of the Florida House.

Posted by: Paul R. Harvill | April 19, 2008 at 04:36 PM

__________________________

Why the hostilities?

Someone was absolutely right---she would do much better to pick her fights. That said, there are many Republicans who respect her because she realy does do her homework.
She really does read the bills, the questions she asks need to be asked.
She's not one of the sheep, and that's a great, and rare thing.
She may not be missed by some, but people who don't even know her will be much worse off for her absence.
Too bad more members don't take some lessons from her.

The ones who will miss her the least are the same ones who don't think for themselves but merely follow like sheep (or lemmings to be more accurate).

She is a bright woman who as she moves into future political office would be wise to remain ever vigilant and to never back down from a fight, but to not take things so personally.

It's the sheep who are glad she is leaving, because she points out their worst tendencies of following blindly, and they can't stand it.

[better than you]

First of all she does pick her fights, and she does not blind side people. Members KNOW when they are going to get "Buchered" because she has the respect for the process to go to them and ask questions before hand. If she can get a straight answer, she won't attack them on the floor. If they refuse to answer her, then there is a problem. We need more members like Rep. Bucher. More members willing to actually read the analysis and not just ask their staff/lobbyists "what do you think of this." And if it wasn't for the pure arrogance of the Corleone Family (A.K.A. House GOP Leadership), members would actually listen. Maybe if they listened to her before they got on the floor, and didn't try to sneak crap in, we wouldn't have these problems. Rep. Bucher, we will miss you in Tallahassee!

Bucher is sometimes the only Watch Dog" for the people. Far better than Tax Watch which has been bought out by big business.

Bucher is annyoing on the floor and in committee...but as someone said before...she is surprisingly "cool" to have a beer with. Strange, I know.

That annoying whine,, "Mister Speeeeker!" will not be missed on the floor. It is like fingernails on a blackboard times 10.

[Liberalism=Totalitarianism]

Ben Stein's new film, Expelled, should be seen by anyone interested in the new Dark Age of totalitarianism which seems to be creeping through our institutions of communication, information and education. Perhaps only Stein could properly portray the Kafkaesque persecution of scientists, journalists and other professionals who challenge the increasingly untenable proposition that an almost incomprehensibly complex mechanism -- the living cell -- could have evolved through the oafish mechanism of natural selection.

The object of hatred by the automatons of hoary Darwinism are not just those honest and open minded thinkers -- some of whom are Christians, some of whom are Jewish, some of whom are agnostics -- but also hated is the very idea of a Blessed Creator. Not only are these haters clear about the necessity of Darwinism to be true, even if it is not true, but they are equally clear about their lust to deconstruct morality and to reduce life itself to a meaningless treadmill.

These haters have no compunction about destroying careers simply for the sake of intellectual terrorism. The merits of guided evolution are dismissed without discussion, and the victims of this terrorism are dealt with in a manifestly dishonest way. Stein shows his audience the letters from academic thugs who deny tenure to promising professors or who deal roughly with tenured professors -- letters which show that the official explanations for their "discipline" were transparent lies.

Science is not science at all, he shows us: It is simply an effort to compel any representatives of academia or foundations to parrot the core principles of nihilism, leaving man as god. Stein is not afraid to pursue that nihilism to its ultimate conclusion in the Nazi "mercy killings" of the handicapped or the Nazi extermination of Jews as "inferior creatures" in his grim walk through Dachau.

The ugly tapestry includes many threads. Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, respectable institutions in the eyes of ordinary Americans, held beliefs similar to Hitler; and before Hitler otherwise upstanding Americans were proposing things, in concept, as awful as Hitler. The perfection of humanity through selective breeding, though, comes earlier than Sanger or Hitler. Ben Stein quotes directly from Darwin in his Origin of Species, making it clear that to Darwin man was an animal, just like any farm animal, and that the perfection of humanity through "scientific" methods was commendable.

Stein allows closes the familiar escape hatch for this sort of malice toward human life and human purpose. Did Hitler know what he was doing? He certainly gobbled up Darwinism whole, and the "survival of the fittest" as a moral principle (or, rather, and amoral principle) fairly leaps from the pages of Mein Kampf. Hitler was not ignorant. But more importantly, Hitler was not insane. He was evil.

That is the darkest theme that runs like a cold, black undercurrent through Exposed. Evil is real, very real. Unless one is prepared to say the Holocaust was not evil (and some of the people who Stein interviews are quite willing to say just that), then evil is real. Unless one is prepared to say that firing serious professors to intimidate others into silence, and then lying about the reasons for the firings is evil, then evil is real. Unless one is prepared to say that concealing truth while hiding behind the banner of science is evil, thus insuring that science itself cannot progress, is evil, then evil is real.

Our lives have been saturated with scientific lies. Men and women are interchangeable parts, scientists once said, because the reality demanded by feminists required that lie. Millions of men and women have been sacrificed on the altar of that pseudo-scientific theology. More torment is being invented each day by the priests of political theology so that mythical global warning can be appeased like some vengeful Aztec deity. What has been called science is increasingly a sterile, humorless theology.

The limits of human knowledge are well known to scientists. You or I can have no real information about reality that at the time of our birth is travelling away from us at the speed of light. We can refer to what other people have said or seen or written, but we can never know anything at all. Nor can we know with precision what will happen at the subatomic level. The Uncertainty Principle is an absolute bar to anything more than statistical patterns and probabilities. And we have no idea at all how life began. One of the funny parts of Expelled is when Stein tries to pry from certain foes of God and guided evolution how life began. The first cell glommed on to a crystal, one hater opined. Space aliens brought life to Earth, another suggested, hastily adding that this civilization itself arose through Darwinian means.

It might have been nice if Stein had pointed out that the example typically given of evolution by natural selection -- white moths in industrial Great Britain dying when the smokestacks appeared and black moths surviving -- was a proof that no change in species and no mutations were required at all: The black and white moths were both of the same species.

It might also have been nice if Stein had delved a bit into the necessity of the Medieval university, which was profoundly religious, as the birthplace of all of what we call science today (thus showing that not only is religion not incompatible with science, but religion may be indispensable to science.)

But these are small criticisms indeed. Expelled is a masterpiece. Watch it. Tell your friends about it. And most of all, show it to your children.

Bucher alienates even those that want to work with her.

She, unfortunately, has the mentality that if you don't agree with her on 100% of the issues then you are against her 100%.

Bucher is a professional jerk. She relishes making an jerk of herself on every issue. If she really wanted to help her causes, she would either shut up or speak in opposition to her own amendments!
Good riddance.
And, yes, she deserves every bit of (expletive deleted) you bloggers can heap upon her. She has been a complete waste of breathe for eight years.

Most legislators can disagree without being disagreeable. Bucher can't. She is the worst. If she is on your side, you will lose. She is poison. She is worse than ineffective, she is counter-effective.

[ftdallasfantoms]

Susan is the heart of her party. She decided long ago to represent the democratic baseline - and that she does, well. She traded away personal gain (Bills that make it) for speaking the truth in a place where the truth is lost. The attention she gains is amazing...just look above. Susan has been a huge success - it is a matter of how succss is defined. She never was in this to make friends, only to speak for the voiceless. Her integrity is incredible. I suspect she sleeps very well every night.

Frau Bucher is an idiot.

Nothing more entertaining to the masses than a Don Quixote. "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" somehow seems apropos for Ms. Bucher.

Eight years and never passed a bill, never stopped a bill from passing.