Category: Politics

Sometimes a man of the cloth can warm an atheist’s heart. Of course, I’d like to think it’s already warm, without benefit of clergy, so take that introductory sentiment as just a figure of speech.

On July 8, both priests will join 35 other defendants in [a Georgia] court to be tried for “crossing the line” during a mass demonstration at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — better known by its former name, the School of the Americas — at Fort Benning, Ga.
Despite its dramatic sound, crossing the line means peacefully trespassing onto the Army base. Each November, hundreds of protesters — who contend that the school trains foreign soldiers in such black arts as assassination and making biological and chemical weapons — trespass and get themselves arrested.
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Along with calling the court “a pimp for the Pentagon,” [one of the two priests] will ask [the judge] to sentence him to study at the Fort Benning school so he can “tell the world: indeed the new institute has amended its ways and teaches only nonviolence and democracy to its students.”

More than a few sane words have been delivered by an Israeli who bears really extraordinary credentials for these times, and these places.
How can we as Americans deal with our shame as a people saddled with this government? How much and for how long will we and the entire world pay for our stupidity, our greed and our egotism? What was our excuse?

Everynody knew, of course, that it was a stupid speech, perhaps the most silly ever uttered by an American president. But who will confront the leader of the world’s sole superpower?
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[Bush’s Copenhagen speech] says that the Palestinians must chose their leader in a free, democratic election, but that they are forbidden to elect a leader not approved by Sharon and Bush.
They must establish a democratic, liberal, pluralistic and multi-party system, including separation of powers, independent courts and transparent finances. For that purpose they are commanded to accept the assistance of America’s allies in the Middle East: democratic Saudi Arabia, pluralistic Egypt and liberal Jordan. Financial transparency like in Riyadh, separation of powers like in Cairo, independent courts like in Amman.
The establishment of this ideal system is a precondition to any peace negotiations. In Europe, such a system was achieved after a struggle of hundreds of years. In the Arab world, it does not exist anywhere. Arafat is the only Arab chief of state who was chosen in free elections, under close international supervision, personally overseen by ex-President Jimmy Carter.

A brief check with a reporter on the scene in Gaza today.

Gaza is completely fenced in. It’s like the world’s largest prison.
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Gaza is a land mass of 360 square kilometers. Of that, 58% is in hands of Palestinians; 42% is in hands of the Israeli military and settlements. In Palestinian-controlled areas there are 1.25 million people. In the Israeli controlled area, only 4000. That works out to be something like 6000 Palestinians per square kilometer in their areas, and 27 Israelis per square kilometer in their areas. Each settler has 226 times as much space as each Palestinian (leaving aside land quality).

And a voice apparently crying in another wilderness, the land of gay journalism.

Good lord, you would think from the torrent of vitriol and hysteria from [letters to the editor about Gay City News articles on the Middle East]that the Palestinians were occupying Jewish land in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; that three times as many Jews as Palestinians had died since the start of the second intifada; that in 1948, 700,000 Jews were made homeless and never allowed to return to the cities they were born in; that starting in the 1880s, a couple of thousand Palestinians told the hundreds of thousands of Jews living west of the River Jordan that one day, god willing, all the land would be theirs.

Our governement’s current posture toward the rest of the world, and especially my own terrifying picture of the chaotic world which that posture will actually bring home to everyone on the planet in the very near future, looks like nothing so much as the ethos and the brutality of stone-age tribes ripping each other to pieces. The difference lies primarily in the sophistication and the destructiveness of the weaponry, and the fact that our own age knows a better way than that on which we are embarked now, led on by fools and cheered on by the “loyal (Democratic) opposition.”

For this nation to claim the unilateral right to pre-emptively strike (with nuclear weapons) at its enemies, and to determine which leaders and nations are evil, points to aspirations of empire-building. Still, that’s not what portends disaster for humanity. Our government seems to think that only we are capable of pre-emptive wars and covert assassinations, and that there are no consequences for such actions.
This new policy threatens to encourage belligerent parties everywhere to adopt a similar ethos that will spill over into all facets of life, including children’s playgrounds. “Treat others the way you would like to be treated” will be replaced with “Get them before they get you.”
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That’s not to say terrorism isn’t a real threat. It is. However, we could eliminate every terrorist alive today and still not come close to eliminating the breeding grounds of misery and hatred that spawn them. This administration seems unable to differentiate between terrorism and insurrection.
The military implications of this new ethos are obvious. However, the fundamental shift we are talking about threatens thousands of years of our evolving civilization. Like falling dominoes, every facet of life is affected, and we become a less safe and a more indifferent and dehumanized society.

The Green Party’s nominee for governor of New York should not be as exceptional as he clearly is in the midst of the current swamp of opportunistic, middle-of-the-whatever, do-as-the-Man-says, make-no-waves and make-no-difference rich boys or paid hacks of both the major parties. But he is.

Enter Stanley Aronowitz, 69, the Green Party’s nominee this year for governor of New York, who, when you listen to him call for higher taxes to increase money for schools, pay for campaign finance reform and establish state-subsidized health insurance, is the anti-candidate this time around. He has set out to anger the powerful and the rich who, he says, pull the strings of the “Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush regime,” stressing that the troika is listed in order of importance. And, like all of those who believe in a cause, he is willing to go down with the ship rather than compromise.
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OUR democracy is in trouble,” he said. “The Democratic and Republican Parties have converged. Their economic policies are not different. They believe that anything that hurts business is not a viable position.”
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“Dostoyevsky taught me about irony,” he said. “I have great trouble with this as a would-be politician. You cannot be a successful politician and be ironic. Our slogan — tax and spend — is meant to be ironic, but people don’t get it. They get upset.”

And kindly permit the real Left to go about the business of trying to save the Republic (and your own integrity, where it may still survive).

As a gay man, I find it laughable that anyone could vote for the Republican party, but “they’re not as bad as the GOP” is not a good enough reason for me to vote for the Democrats. They must earn my vote — they do not have a “right” to it. Given the ways the party has acquiesced as the Bush administration has shredded the Bill of Rights since 9/11, I will not vote for a Democratic candidate again unless I see a fundamental change in their behavior.

An excerpt from an interview with Michael Newdow, the man who brought the suit which resulted in a court ruling against the use of the phrase, “under god,” in the Pledge of Allegiance recited in schools.

[Interviewer]: I have some reaction here in the audience. I think Mike from Alabama wants to say something to you, Mr. Newdow.
Audience member: We are talking about the greatest flag to the greatest nation in the world, I can’t believe that Americans will allow something like this to go by without voicing their opinion. This is ludicrous to me. I just can’t believe that the courts would give him the time of day.
Newdow: I agree, it is the greatest nation and what has made it great is our Constitution. The framers were quite wise in recognizing what religion can do and how it can cause hatred and how it can cause death. You don’t have to go far in this world, outside of our nation, to see where that has happened. It is prevalent over the entire globe and the reason we don’t have it here is because we have an establishment clause … If Mike there from Alabama wouldn’t mind saying “we are one nation under Buddha” every day, or “one nation under David Koresh” or “one nation” under some religious icon that he doesn’t believe in … if he doesn’t understand the difference then we have a problem.

Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the US Supreme Court for Slate, suggested on NPR this morning that she thinks the 9th Court’s decision is silly, yet she muses on Slate’s own web site, “I must wonder why … all the religious groups in the country are going apoplectic. My guess is that the words “under God” do promote monotheism, and of course the effect of that isn’t just ‘de minimus,’ as they say.” So, is it really silly for the Court to protect minorities and the Constitution?
A few additional notes on the subject which I predict [no stretch!] won’t die:
1.) Yes, “under God” [proposed by the Catholic Knights of Columbus and pushed by the jingoistic Hearst newspapers of the time] was adopted during the McCarthy era to contrast our society specifically with that of atheistic communism [which incidently did not require an oath from its citizens, of any age].
2.) The Pledge itself has a quite modern history. It was the brainchild in 1892 of a radical leftist, Francis Bellamy.

The original pledge began “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” but that was changed in the 1920s so immigrants would be clear on which flag they saluted [it’s now “the” flag]. A stiff, one-armed salute that accompanied the pledge was dropped during World War II because it was deemed Nazi-like.

[Egaads! I remember the one-armed salute myself, long after WWII, but I suppose Catholic schools were slow to adopt the less fascist form.]

3.) Any Pledge, in any form, is authoritarian, stupid and counter-productive for the encouragement of an informed and flourishing citizenry.
4.) Our Founding Fathers were not Christians, but rather Deists, if they professed any relationship to an imaginary supreme friend.
5.) As a motto, “In God We Trust” replaced the particulary federalist and un-Republican [with a big “R”], “E Pluribus Unum” [“from many, one”], on our coins only during the Civil War, on our paper currency in the fifties, and, I believe, only then in our courts, this at the same time we put god in the Pledge and in our schools.
6.) “So Help Me God” are the final words of, I believe all, of our oaths of governmental office, and of the oath required in our courts of law [unless you want to make the kind of scene I look forward to each time I am there, whether as part of a jury or as a defendent in a civil disobedience action].
7.) Apparently somewhere around 90 percent of Americans believe in a personal god and in heaven and hell. The U.S. is the most religious of all the industrialized nations. Our current executive, legislative and judicial governmental branches are all increasingly acting as if we were officially, rather than just functionally, ruled as a theocracy.
The argument for total neutrality on god:
I do not believe there is one god or goddesses or many gods or godesses.
You [forgive me, my good readers, allow me the rhetorical “you”] believe there is or are gods or goddesses.
I do not want my government, its courts, its schools or any of its institutions to tell me there are gods or goddesses, nor to suggest that I am in agreement with that belief. You do not want your government, its courts, its schools or any of its institutions to tell you there are no gods or goddesses, nor to suggest that that you am in agreement with that belief.
The Constitution protects both of us, regardless of the actual numbers we can enlist in our ranks of disbelievers or believers.
One hope for the future:
The current hullabaloo over the Califonia-based Court’s ruling is ironically sure proof against the only argument which the U.S. Supreme Court has used and could use going forward to retain “god” in our government’s institutions and practices, that the phrases are protected from the Establishment Clause because their religious significance has been lost through rote repetition.
Apparently “god” still does have a religious significance. Good news for the religious, and, maybe, good news for those who are not.

For those who may have already missed this item contained within the text of an earlier link, here it is again, from a different source. Note that the proposed Federal Agency will effectively control us all, even as we are told we can’t control it. Interestingly enough this link is from that bastian of often mindless conservatism, The Washington Times!

A provision in the bill seeking to create a Homeland Security Department will exempt its employees from whistleblower protection, the very law that helped expose intelligence-gathering missteps before September 11.
The legislation now before Congress contains a provision allowing the director of the proposed agency to waive all employee protections in Title V, including the Whistleblower Protection Act. The act protects government employees from retaliation or losing employment for speaking out on waste, fraud and abuse.
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[In addition] The department would not be required to release information under the Freedom of Information Act. This would eliminate the agency’s responsibility to answer questions from the public. Advisory committees that normally include public input would be immune, and the Cabinet secretary would have veto power over inspector general audits and investigations.

The George W. Bushies do have the “vision thing” the father’s administration admitted it lacked. Unfortunately “…they are rather less interested in the reality thing.”
Real problems, even really big problems, are seen by this tinkertoy administration only as opportunities for its greedy and autocratic agenda.

A slump in the economy was an opportunity to push a tax cut that provided very little stimulus in the short run, but will place huge demands on the budget in 2010. An electricity shortage in California was an opportunity to push for drilling in Alaska, which would have produced no electricity and hardly any oil until 2013 or so. An attack by lightly armed terrorist infiltrators was an opportunity to push for lots of heavy weapons and a missile defense system, just in case Al Qaeda makes a frontal assault with tank divisions or fires an ICBM next time.
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For the distinctive feature of all the programs the administration has pushed in response to real problems is that they do little or nothing to address those problems. Problems are there to be used to pursue the vision. And a problem that won’t serve that purpose, whether it’s the collapse of confidence in corporate governance or the chaos in the Middle East, is treated as an annoyance to be ignored if possible, or at best addressed with purely cosmetic measures. Clearly, George W. Bush’s people believe that real-world problems will solve themselves, or at least won’t make the evening news, because by pure coincidence they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.