Waiter, there's a terrorist in my tea.

"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it."

-Ron Paul-

What is it about Florida? Is it as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, that since it's the lowest point on the map of the US, everything loose wound up down here?

We may be no more fatuous than the Rest of the country in blabbering about our "freedom" and how everyone in the world is jealous of it and how every military exploit is about freedom and every casualty is a sacrifice for freedom and that this freedom is the result of our foreign wars rather than our constitutional law, but we sure look strange to that supposedly jealous planet when we agitate that more and more of it be taken away from us -- in the name of freedom.

Speaking of loose things floating around in the bilges of America, Florida Representative elect Allen West, soon to represent the 22nd district, who identifies with that nebulous assemblage of misfits and nitwits called the Tea Party, seems to be all in favor of censoring the press despite all his tea soaked and treacly rhetoric about constitutional restraints on government power.

" . . . I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to do this and also supported him and applauding him [Julian Assenge] for the efforts. So that's kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime."

No, he's not talking about reporting troop positions or exposing covert agents, he's talking about embarrassing the administration as "a serious crime." That's the same administration Tea Party folks have been waving guns at and making threats at and calling tyrannical, Marxist and illegal.

Yes, it's been all too hard for most of us to tell exactly what message the Tea Party people are bringing to the party, and this message of government for government's sake; government by, for and of the Executive branch and military authority and damn the constitution, smells more like plain old exaggerated nationalism and authoritarianism than tea.

One of the ways "the terrorists" won, is that domestic authoritarians posing as libertarians can simply identify anything that threatens them: things like the truth, for instance, as "Terrorism" and make it a crime. Things like identifying high crimes and high criminals and the kind of lies and manipulations of truth that get people killed and bankrupt economies. Revealing a crime; a politically motivated burglary, for example, becomes, by the logic of Tea, "aiding and abetting a serious crime" and "terrorism" while actually aiding and abetting by hiding it or obstructing justice becomes. . . what, freedom?

Is West a moderate compared to Uncle Mike Huckabee who demands summary execution for Assenge? Palin, Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and even CNN are calling him a "terrorist" and telling us not only that we can't handle the truth - we don't deserve it and the government doesn't owe it to us. It's all about freedom of course - and all of this from people calling Obama a "tyrant." So whatever the Tea party is selling, I think we can dispense with the idea that it has anything to do with less powerful government, a government restrained by law; anything to do with a government of the people, responsible to the people and most of all, anything to do with freedom other than to garble it's meaning.

Boiling the Tea kettle

"The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."

-US Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas-

Anyone in the US with more political awareness than a telephone pole knows that there's a whole lot of loosely related and sometimes contradictory stuff hidden under the camouflage blanket of "we're for smaller, less intrusive government," including the somewhat contrary and certainly not Libertarian opinion that that government may, at its own discretion, hide its actions, its statements and defend its deceptions and coverups, making the exercise of protected rights a crime. That so many who feel concern about paternalistic government can none the less defend it passionately and thus sanctify subterfuge is puzzling. That members of that government can ask that we treat the media and its sources as traitors and terrorists with all the extra-legal powers it possesses, is hardly puzzling at all. That the need to cover its ass supersedes any respect for the Constitution it pretends to worship: that government can be in terror of being exposed, hardly makes the case, in my opinion, for Terrorism. Perhaps the test of being a true and loyal Republican is not to think of Richard Nixon at this point.

So how do we feel about Wikileaks release of leaked State Department documents yesterday? Well at least one Republican congressman recommends that we move that organization under another one of those capacious and convenient camo blankets: the one we call terrorism, or 'terrism' in the dialect spoken by a great number of self-styled conservatives. So, by the gerrymandering of ill-defined symbols, we manage to expose -- or at least the horrifically hyperbolic Rep. Peter King (R-NY) hopes to expose Wikileaks and perhaps anyone revealing that which slithers through the wires to and from Washington, to the dire and drastic treatment we afford "foreign terrorist organizations." To expose embarrassing diplomatic cables showing many world leaders at their scurrilous antics, is "worse than a military attack" he said last night.

King, says CBS News, New York, has written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder asking that Julian Assange of Wikileaks be prosecuted as a spy for publishing 'sensitive' information given him by a whistleblowing soldier, even though that's what the mainstream media does, is supposed to do and the Court has affirmed their constitutional right to do.

It will be interesting to see the Tea Party reaction to this -- if there is one. They'll be torn between maintaining support for the First Amendment and the role of a free press and the treasured myth of its untrustworthy liberal bias. I'd like to think that it might increase pressure to actually define what they mean by a smaller, less intrusive and more limited government, but as they say - a watched teapot never boils.

An unbalanced truth.

Seems like yesterday when criticizing George Bush was close enough to treason that the police would get involved. I remember people walking out of a Jon Lovitz stand-up routine when he made some mild crack about Bush's garbled English. I remember tirades on TV when Streisand aired her opinions of the president. I remember grumbling in the movie theater lobby after a showing of "W" about how "you shouldn't criticize a president like that." There were the Dixie Chicks, and there were the Radio bloviators out there bashing liberals as though freedom of speech were some Marxist plot. The word treason, the accusation of "emboldening" and giving aid and comfort to some amorphous enemy was given enough air time to warm the climate for real.

I remember audiences for Bush's town hall meetings being vetted to make sure flattering questions were the only ones asked. I remember protesters being herded into "free speech" zones behind barbed wire and miles from anywhere the President might be. I remember people being escorted from the premises by armed policemen simply because of a bumper sticker on the car they arrived in.

Many people persist in telling us that such things are common on "both sides" yet I do not remember anyone being escorted away from the current president for carrying signs advocating killing "his ugly wife and stupid children" nor for carrying guns. It's perhaps the most false of the false equivalences that constitute political dialogue today.

Of course if you want to tell me the courts share the blame, I'll agree. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of two Colorado residents who were excluded unwillingly from a speech by President Bush in 2005 because White House aides saw them arrive in a car with a bumper sticker that proclaimed: “No More Blood For Oil.”

Do we attribute this slap in the face for the First amendment to the Bush Police State? Certainly it wasn't the only one, but Bush is gone and the highest court seems to think we won't care that they don't care enough to hear the case.

So is it now that the freedom to have a bumper sticker on your car -- that is the freedom to criticize the government, to petition the government, to print your opinions for all to read can simply be washed away by a government that can't be bothered to listen to it? Stare decisis?

I don't know about you, but no matter how conservative, libertarian or just plain ornery you are, I don't see a way to pin this one on Obama or to try to pull a fast one with the "both sides do it so its not so bad" sidestep. If you agree that this kind of presidential power is inappropriate, you'll have to agree that getting away with it because the courts don't care is worse. So can we shut up about "liberal active courts" and recognize that this one at least has come down on the side of the police state and the Liberals had nothing to do with it?

So where's the anger? where's the admission that yes, we supported this administration and its policies and WE WERE WRONG!

You will recite after me. . . . or else

The pledge of Allegiance has come a long way from a short declaration appearing in a Christian Socialist Children's magazine in 1892 to its current status as a somewhat longer treasured icon of patriotic sentiment and theological affirmation recited by young and old in all sorts of settings. That was back when Socialism and Christianity were seen as allied ideas and back when our country was pumping itself up and cheering on its urge to empire and celebrating it's chauvinistic urges.

It's hard to overestimate the fanatical insistence of Americans that all must swear an oath that calls this secular Republic a "Nation under God," hard as that may be to define, and calls upon us to be an eternal ally of a piece of cloth. A few years ago , when someone in California filed suit against a school district claiming forced recitation of a religious oath was unconstitutional (it is) half the cars on my local roads, thousands of miles away had "Under God" painted on their windows by irate owners who were clearly in opposition to a citizen's right not to have official religious beliefs forced upon them and their children. The kind of people who hold an annual claim to victimhood and insist that no one impede their right to force religious observance on others. Freedom and justice for all? What are you, a damned Liberal?

67 years ago, or three score and 7 if you prefer, the Supreme Court ruled that forced recitation was a violation of the first amendment and that was a decade before the "Under God" was added by President Eisenhower to help make the USSR look more satanic at the expense of Americans who don't believe in disembodied spirits living in the sky.

You have to ask yourself; if it's unconstitutional to force a citizen to declare a political position, how much more unlawful is it to insist he declare religious feelings not his own?

Not lawful enough to dissuade a Maryland school teacher from shouting at, demanding recitation and finally having a student taken into custody by the police amidst a chorus of mockery for exercising the rights we love to flaunt in front of the world as "Our Freedoms."

In the American madhouse, where asking children to listen to an introduction by the President is compared with Pol Pot and the slaughter of millions, where government administered health insurance is compared with Hitler and Fascism and the very idea of progress is "Marxist," what should we say about people who are not only comfortable with forcing their political and religious views down the throats of other people's children? Well, we've run out of outrageous hyperbole, thanks to Fox and the Republicans. Most of us aren't quite smart or even sane enough to understand a careful explanation of how we have given away our birthright and become the same kind of oppressors our forefathers tried to escape by coming here and that we' don't have a hell of a lot to brag about in the freedom department that most other countries have more of.

Do yourself a favor - support the ACLU, because freedom can't protect itself and all the guns and bombs and battleships can't bring it back once Americans throw it away.

Librarians attack

It's understandable that John McCain wants to distance himself from George Bush. No one can blame him, even though he seems to be intent on carrying out Bush's agenda to a significant extent. Bush has the popularity of Leprosy at the moment and it's clear that party loyalty no longer extends to allowing comparison to the sitting president. I can however blame his campaign staff and the Denver Colorado police from denying the right of a 61 year old librarian to be on public property for a public meeting, carrying a sign proclaiming McCain=Bush.

The banshees at Fox and the snickering snots who listen to them will never let you hear the end of the Obama campaign workers who asked two women wearing Muslim head scarves not to sit where the camera could see him, but they weren't escorted out to the street by the police, weren't issued a ticket for trespassing or told they would be arrested for constitutionally protected behavior.

Of course the cable news opinion shouters who still support Bush have a chance to show that the McCain campaign has insulted them and the President and the party, but I'm willing to bet we won't hear anything but silence from them and from John McCain. Republican apologists have little to build a defense on other than the grave danger posed by nice old lady librarians with opinions, but they will probably try.

I hope I can be forgiven for suspecting that McCain will be another president who thinks the constitution is a stumbling block and try to scare us out of our desire for freedom.

Screw the pledge and the flag it rode in on.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

US Supreme Court - West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

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Americans don't really care much for freedom and the evidence for that is strong. They don't like people who exercise that freedom or resist having it taken away from them. That's why the ACLU is the bogeyman of the authoritarians, secular and religious, and why people with various objections to being forced to say things they disagree with, or forced to swear oaths in support of symbols, or forced to assume postures indicating worship and adoration of secular idols have to resort to such organizations to avoid the nasty consequences of conscience. I hear far more anger directed at the ACLU than at the KKK and most often it's because the former is hard at work making sure you can still say what you like and not be forced to say things or to perform quasi religious rituals you do not like. The US is the sort of country where a candidate who doesn't assume the position of worship when singing the sacred song or pledging himself to worship a piece of cloth and the God/State it represents generates more furor than one who breaks the basic foundational laws that are the State.

Few things irk this authoritarian country more than such disobedience and the courts and laws that support its legitimacy. Obama is still paying a price for having a less than a passionate personal epiphany while singing the Anthem while even Liberal Air America host Ed Schultz decries the failure of most NBA players to look reverent, hands on heart in a Roman salute when the song is played.

We have no lack of impassioned orators swooning their way through speeches extolling those who died for the flag, as though the flag had anything to do with the liberties we, on occasion, call freedom, but in my opinion we have no free country when people are required to recite worshipful formulae, make sacred gestures and wear tokens of reverence.

That's why the furor continues in the case of the Minnesota school that has a policy of punishment for failure to stand up when illegally required to make a religious oath to a piece of cloth. Perhaps it's coincidental, but I've noticed a lot more of those Taiwanese car flags today and an unusual number of UNDER GOD bumper stickers. They weren't, at any rate, put there in support of three students who were suspended from a public school for sitting down while flag rituals were being conducted. If anything it's a protest against the audacity of the ACLU to write a letter to a Minnesota school board to remind some small minded pedants what freedom ( and the law) is all about.

Strangely enough even such strange bedfellows as Stop the ACLU.com recognize the policy as an infringement, if only as an infringement on freedom of religion. Many religions balk at the swearing of oaths. The question of whether they would recognize the rights of the non-religious to such protection hasn't been answered.

People on both sides of the flag idolatry issue have some strange opinions as to the antiquity of it all. Those who insist the pledge was written by a Socialist seem to forget that it was Eisenhower who in 1954 made it into a religious pledge and caused me to stop reciting it. Everyone seems to have forgotten that the hand on heart salute was adopted only in the 1940's and before that the Nazi salute was recommended. Our current anthem was signed into law as such in 1931 and putting religious messages on the money stems from the religious frenzy surrounding (and justifying) the Civil War. In fact religious frenzy and war go hand in hand and much of the current emotion stems from the confusion between the invasion of Iraq, obedience to the president and worship of the flag. It's not a coincidence. It's not fundamental to our Country's ideals. It's made up as we go along. It's all designed to foster unquestioning obedience and suppress objection. It's time we woke up to the truth.

The cult of Freedom

It's my personal observation that the average Englishman has a better vocabulary than the average American, but it's not a point I want to argue. That the British are just as full of self-righteous idiocy as anyone is an argument more to my liking, and I have evidence. According to The Guardian, a London teenager has fallen into the hands of the Linquistic Inquisition and is facing prosecution for having publicly used the world "cult" to describe the cult of Elron Hubbard, known as Scientology.

The crusade to rid language of any words that might somehow be construed to be offensive, is raging on both sides of the Atlantic. Such things thrive in inarticulate America, but apparently the Brits ( it seems to be allowed to call them that but don't call the Japanese Japs) are just as bad.

Why isn't Scientology a cult, and whether it is or whether it isn't, why is that a bad word? My casual readings in Archaeology frequently contain mentions of the cult of Isis or Venus or the Magdalene or the Virgin Mary. It derives from the Latin word for worship, but apparently, what's good for one Scholar is bad for another - we must consult the oracle.

The very American Merriam Webster dictionary defines cult as:

• formal religious veneration
• a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
• a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious
• a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator
• great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.

The veddy British Oxford dictionary adds that the word sometimes describes a religion that exercises excessive control over its adherents, but then all of these definitions can apply and have at times applied rightly and honestly to any religion at all. In fact these are all definitions of religion and that includes the fact that every religion is unorthodox to other religions.

" Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult" read the confiscated placard peacefully displayed at a peaceful demonstration in front of the opulent London Headquarters of the Church of Scientology. Would it have been less "offensive" if it read: "Scientology is not a cult, it is a dangerous religion?" Who can tell, because either statement is, in my reading, equivalent. Someone is telling us however. Someone, some authority not derived from the will of the governed has an arcane system by which their dark stars favor a word on one day or denounce it on another and it sure as hell works in mysterious ways. By mysterious, I mean stupid.

If any speech offensive to someone looking for offense is actionable, then do I have the right to have the Gospel of John confiscated and half the works of Martin Luther banned for vicious condemnation of the Jews? Should the finally deceased Jerry Fallwell have been arrested for saying God Didn't listen to Jews or that the AntiChrist was a Jew? Forgive me for being confused. If Christianity or Islam or the cult of Refafu claims that whatever religion I might have is dangerous to any soul I might have, then Christians or Sufis or any other cultists anxious to discuss the error of my ways should be silenced and prosecuted along with anyone standing at any pulpit, who describes anyone else as a sinner, apostate, heretic, gentile or reprobate. The wages of sin is death? as a member of the Church of Sin and a committed sinner, I'm offended. Call the police! Call my lawyer!

Of course, in the interest of preserving my own freedom of speech I'm not hoping to see any such thing, but I am hoping that whatever mysterious and invisible entity there is that decides what I may or may not say -- and whatever dangerous cult surrounds it -- will reveal itself unto me so that I can dedicate myself to offending it.

Freedom of some religion

I've been told that there is freedom of religion in Iran. That's almost true. Unlike the US, where the government may not legally establish any list of approved or disapproved religions (Sorry, Republicans) only Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism are legal in Iran.

Consequently, when 54 adherents of the Baha'i faith went out to help the poor of Shiraz, or so they said, they were arrested for proselytizing or as it was official charged, spreading propaganda against the regime. They were sentenced today to four years in prison. Of those 54, the sentences of 51 were reduced to one year conditionally while they were sent off to study at the Islamic Propaganda Organisation, ostensibly to be bullied onto dropping the idea that Bahá'u'lláh was the last of the prophets and accepting that the other guy was God's final phone call to planet Earth.

I'm not picking on Iran, at least not without also picking on the many other countries that are theocratic or even nominally atheistic where it's possible to prosecute someone for belonging to a religion or even a secular organization; to talk about it openly, to meet peacefully. Perhaps someone will remember just how precious the First Amendment to our constitution is when charming idiots like Mike Huckabee talk about changing America to be in line with his religious beliefs.

Hold that thought

"The Terrorism Act and the restrictions it imposes on the personal freedom exist to protect this country, its interests here and abroad, its citizens, and those who visit here. Its protection embraces us all. Its restrictions apply to us all, whatever our personal religious or political beliefs."

said the judge. I'd be ashamed of a country where this kind of cringing cowardice had us abandoning the bulwarks of liberty and rushing to the safety of a smothering police state. I'm glad it was England and not the US who sentenced a 23 year old shop assistant for thought crimes. Samina Malik was given a 9 month suspended jail sentence this week in London for scribbling "terrorist" poems on cash register receipts. It would have gone much harder on her if she had had "terrorist objects" although she did have "information about weapons" and had associated on line with unsavory characters. In other words she did nothing wrong, but there's evidence she fantasized about it. I wonder how such a law might treat people who read the "left Behind" books and dream about Jesus casting Jews into fire pits.


In a way it reminds me of some of the reasons the American colonies got fed up with England, it was a tar-pit of safety traps and brier patch of God appointed kings, just as some would have the USA become today. For at least this fleeting moment in America, I can have weapons, information about weapons, write poems and paint pictures about any damn thing I please and have freedom to assemble peacefully whether it please the whimpering, pants-wetting citizens or their protest fearing government. In fact if "terrorism" consists in subduing people through fear, then Great Britain's Terrorism Act fits the description quite well.

Ms. Malik may disgust me. Her ideas may make my trigger finger itch, but I will not peacefully submit to any laws such as the UK's Terrorism Act. Shame on them.

Winnie the Prophet

You may have gathered that I'm no fan of fundamentalism and that I see moderate religion as a potential petri dish in which crazy religion can bloom faster than staphylococcus on steroids when conditions are right. Consequently when I read of things like Gillian Gibbons' arrest for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohammad, I don't feel superior, or feel that my country is superior to those where religion is protected from "insult" by law. It could happen here and many would welcome it. Even Rudy Giuliani the self proclaimed terrorist fighter, once attempted to shut down the Brooklyn Museum for "Blasphemy" and where I live "denying Christ" is seen by some as another form of treason.

Likewise I see laws against "hate crime" as a dangerous precedent. The promoters of hate crime legislation share the loathing I feel toward certain groups and certain actions, but does granting the Federal Government the power to tell us what constitutes hate crime protect us from a government gone wild, or worse a government infiltrated by religious crazies like that of Sudan? Would calling a stuffed animal by a racist or religiously cynical name constitute hate crime? The definition would be up to people you may not agree with.

No, we're not the Sudan. We don't consider calling a stuffed bear by one of that nation's most popular names either insulting to religion or a hate crime. Even though Ms. Gibbons was simply following the choice of her high school students in naming a class mascot something that half their brothers and uncles and fathers are named, the remote possibility that there was disrespect for religion was enough to get her arrested and she now faces the possibility of 40 lashes, a year in a hell hole jail and a fine. Thus demands their Sharia infested constitution. I'm betting that she will get off lightly and probably will be deported, but as I said, I'm not taking delight in illustrating the kind of horror state that every "faith" I can think of has perpetrated at one time or another.

I don't expect the Spanish Inquisition in America any time soon. I expect that all I would get for refusing to parrot the Eisenhower pledge is some social ostracism and if I were to attach a Jesus Sucks bumper sticker to my car, I'd better be sure my insurance was up to date, but let's be aware: It's not Islam; it's not Christianity; it's not any particular religion -- it's religion in general that has to protect itself by infiltrating government or becoming government.

Cross posted from The Impolitic

You can feel it on the air

The last day of Summer now seems to mark the beginning of the Crusade season, October is become a cruel month, breeding anger out of the dead truth, mixing memory with hate, stirring dull brains with new lies. In other words, It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Of course there's no chill in the air where I live and the local merchants are hawking Halloween candy and plastic pumpkins made in China but Fox is gearing up it's war stories again. Captions like "War on Christians" and "Anti-Christian Crusade," are appearing on the official propaganda channel of the religious-military-industrial complex.

In case you forgot, them Liberals; those lefties are warring against Christians and against Christmas.

"This is a small part of a big, huge attack by the left on Christianity, which has always disliked the concept of Christianity, "

said Fox News blowhard Andrew Napolitano on Friday, of advertising for a San Francisco block party that used leather bar imagery to depict the Christian myth of the Last Supper.

Using their customary travesty of Socratic method Fox News hosts tossed about every conceivable fallacy in the attempt to build a bigger straw man than last year, using popular Radio Brown-shirt "Mancow" to make the case that mythology and belief should be protected by law, particularly if it's Christian. Mancow, who was criticized for playing a song called "Burning Mosques" 6 years ago apparently feels that appearing on a Fox program gives him the authority to say "I don't make fun of Religion" and asks us what would happen if there were a parody of Gay people.

Well of course there are parodies of Gay people spewed like green vomit from pulpits and political platforms and in televangelistic tirades every Sunday and that's only a small part of the crap about heretics and Jews and infidels and sinners burned at metaphorical stakes. Those people don't need to have their opinions legally protected from humor, criticism, analysis, parody or the inquisitiveness of historians, but Christians do.

"It's a godless group there, and they hate it,"

says moronic Mancow who apparently can't see the comedy in his assertions - as if anything said that invokes the magic word Christ were protected to the detriment of the beliefs of all others. But in a sense Fox has a point. The left leaning people who founded our laws in the secular enlightenment of the time did not distrust religious institutions, religious writings, priests and nations under God and tried to created a nation free of their intrusion into government and into civil liberty. Their ideas have been steadily eroded and never so swiftly as today, with an uneducated and indoctrinated public and modern methods of mass mendacity.

The strange case of Jack McLellan

It's not exactly a case of punishment fitting the crime. As concerns the punishment meted out to Jack McLellan by Superior Court Judge Melvin Sandvig in Los Angeles, on Friday, it's more a matter of there not actually being any crime to punish - outside of McLellan's head, that is. Unlike those we hear about who prey on little girls, McLellan talks about it on television and has operated a web site discussing his obsessions and his methods of getting close to children and photographing them. At one time he posted photographs legally taken of young girls in public places like parks and playgrounds, but he no longer does because of public outrage.

McLellan has no arrest record. There is no evidence that he's ever committed any crimes and he claims that he never will, yet this homeless man, currently living out of his car, was served with a temporary restraining order while on his way to Chicago to make a TV appearance. He is forbidden to get withing 30 feet of anyone under 18; a condition that will make it difficult to be anywhere in public and nearly impossible to enter any commercial establishment. Since stories about him have begun to run in the media recently, mothers of small children have been making frantic complaints that their children have been photographed and the traditional hysteria that defines America is in full bloom. If you're scruffy looking and unshaven and even perhaps if you're not, it can't be a good time to be out on the streets in Southern California with a camera.

Of course this is a temporary order and he will have a chance to challenge it at a hearing set for August 24th, but I have to wonder at preemptive prosecution and thought crimes and their place in this formerly free country where fear and terror and hysteria issue from the media and consumed by the public like water from the tap. I don't want to make too strong a comparison between Salem and Santa Monica, because child molesters really do exist and witches do not, but with more and more localities putting special codes on drivers licenses tagging the owners as sex criminals for the rest of their lives; with more areas forbidding anyone once convicted of unspecified "sex crimes" to own a house or rent an apartment or have an internet account, I have to wonder if we aren't re-creating the medieval concept of outlaw. My disquiet isn't helped by the fact that more things are being labelled as "sex Crimes," including public urination or "mooning" someone out a car window and the perpetrators of such juvenile things can be linked for life with rapists and punished in perpetuity. It would be more than disquieting if such people weren't actually guilty of anything.

Is it 1984 yet?

The character of the man with the sandwich boards saying "the end is neigh" used to appear regularly in cartoons and sometimes on the streets of New York. I used to laugh along with most people and because the end has always proved to be a little further off than proposed, but also because the end always seems nigh. There is an end to everything, however and the end of Freedom in the United States seems visible to the point where I'm about to join the club. The End is Neigh.

This week, President George W. Bush signed another one of those amazing executive orders that in former years would have had Americans loading up their flintlocks, grabbing coonskin caps and taking to the hills. Bush now asserts his right to confiscate the property of anyone who interferes with his war. The definition of 'interfere' seems hazy enough to fit far too many circumstances and of course the ultimate definition lies not with the courts or the Congress, but with George.

Of course, just in case Congress starts to act as though they had some of the powers they are assigned by the Constitution, George W. Bush is ready for them. The Washington Post tells us today that Bush's thugs now assert that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege. Along with his order of May 9th: the "National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51" and "Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20," Bush has virtually unlimited emergency powers, immune to any powers of the legislative and judicial branches among which is the ability to define "emergency." How much longer will any of us be able to write critically of Bush, to read anything unauthorized? Is it 1984 yet?

Paul Craig Roberts is a conservative with credentials: Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He's calling for impeachment and impeachment now. Like me, he's concerned that the stage has been set for a staged attack or provocation that would allow a drastically escalated war and the invocation of emergency powers. It's hard for me to see why these outrageous executive orders, coupled with the relentless "chatter" about threats and gut feelings of threats aren't the top stories of the day and I fear that by the time they do hit the headlines, Bush's Thousand Year Reich will be in full swing.

AND NOW THIS!

I read at a New York Times blog that Defense Undersecretary Eric Edelman has written a letter to Senator Hillary Clinton asserting that: “Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,” Clinton, of course is a US Senator and asking the Defense Department to come up with a plan to withdraw troops wouldn't be seen by a sane administration as anything but a request for a plan and not aiding and abetting an "Enemy." But of course this is not. Of course the Defense Undersecretary is expressing an opinion, but as of this week, that opinion has teeth - big ones.



Impeachment now.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

If you're one of those who doesn't know the names of anyone on the Supreme court, much less the name of the Chief Justice, perhaps it's time you learned. Perhaps you might wish to reflect on another loss for America to the forces of the Right. You voted for these people, you'd better learn to like what your got because we're stuck with them for a long, long time.

In the words of a TV judge from Texas, "what part of abridge didn't you understand?" Chief Justice Roberts probably knows what it means to "abridge." It means to cut short or to curtail which is exactly what has just been done by the Supreme Court ruling today concerning the constitutional right of Joseph Frederick to fly a banner expressing a somewhat enigmatic statement he claims he got from a bumper sticker: Bong Hits 4 Jesus. The courts sided with a disciplinarian high school principal who suspended him for ten days for doing it and another five for quoting Thomas Jefferson as saying "speech limited is speech lost."

Jefferson was right, the constitution is explicit and the judges appointed by our activist President have taken another step toward creating the sort of government Jefferson thought it would take the blood of patriots to overturn. I hope he isn't right again, but if the supreme court will allow someone to be punished for expressing an opinion in the public streets, they have today joined the ranks of the enemies of freedom and further established the illegitimacy of our current government.

UPDATE

Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion says:

“This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message.”

The dissenting pro-freedom voice won't even be with us for much longer. It's just some old folks who remember freedom against the young dogs of Bush. I have to wonder how this activist court will continue to encroach on our basic freedoms using the ancient excuse of protecting the children. Since it's illegal for minors to use alcohol, will they be subject to punishment for reading about Jesus changing water to wine or talking about it in Sunday school? Will wearing a picture of Bogart with his perennial cigarette get them expelled?

Don't laugh, the history of cyrptofascism in the Court suggests this isn't fantasy. The court has been trying to shut us up for years and now that Bush has sent in reenforcements, I can't hope to live long enough to see them gone.

Look what you did when you voted for Bush - just look at what you did.

McDictionary

Corporate Lawyers can be ferocious and McLawyers, like dogs with seven heads, surround you before you know what's bit you. So when the Oxford English Dictionary included McJob, defined as a boring, dead-end gig, the barking began. People tend to portray anything that's mass produced, nearly identical and mass marketed on the scale of "billions and billions" by putting Mc in front, like McMansions or McChurches, but sometimes the prefix refers to the sort of job that could almost be done by a machine if a machine would put up with something that boring and pointless.

But as I said, the McLawyers are as relentless as mosquitoes in a Minnesota summer. I once know a collector of McDonald's memorabilia who used the nickname The McNutt who got a cease and desist letter from them; not because he was making money from it - in fact he was promoting their products - but because he dared to Mc anything without their permission.

But anyway, since they can't sue the dictionary and there are too many people using McJob to take them all to court or to threaten them McDonald's is trying, in an Orwellian way, to stack the deck of language so that McJob will no longer be pejorative but filled with praise.

We can laugh and the Oxford linguists probably will too, unless enough money starts flowing, but the language really doesn't belong fully to us any more. So much of what we say and how we say it has been prescribed by special interest groups, lobbyists, University sociology departments and lawyers, that Orwell himself would giggle. We hardly see health clinics anymore, but "wellness centers" are everywhere. Real Estate Brokers wanted a higher sounding name, so they forced us to say "realtor" and we obey with hardly a snicker. Last week's paper announced the impending arrival of several new "lifestyle centers" which as best I can tell seem to be strip malls.

Most of us still realize that "pre-owned" means used and that a "mobile estate" is still a trailer, but all in all and just like everything else, our language is their language, bought and paid for and the function of their language is to sell and to manipulate.

Fair and balanced lies.

I've long bemoaned the death of the fairness doctrine, which until the "Reagan Renaissance" allowed those defamed to defend themselves on broadcast TV and radio. The philosophy was that the spectrum belonged to everyone, so in return for being able to use it to sell us things, the broadcasters owed us the opportunity to challenge them when it came to news reporting and editorializing. Back then; back before Reagan, it was argued that it was not in the interest of the public who owned the "airwaves" to allow monopolies on news reporting either, but since the actor who played cowboys and presidents on TV decided that such things were unfair to the tycoonery, would-be demagogues have had a field day. They can lie and lie and lie and call it fair and balanced; they can libel, invent and smear without hindrance or consequence.

Republicans like it that way and now that there is renewed talk of having a responsible media that serves the public rather than the Republicans, we can expect lots of howling about how fairness isn't fair and responsibility is irresponsible. It has already begun. The Free Congress Foundation, another one of those right-wing advocacy groups, had an ad hoc discussion on April 13 about Don Imus and what his firing might mean for other radio personalities according to Alex Koppelman in Salon.com.

The fear seems to be that the FCC may be able to force people like Limbaugh and Coulter off the airfor their lies and slanders, although if it's argued that allowing time for rebuttal would do that one could argue that presidential debates or campaigns would likewise be bad for the country. I don't get it.

Face it, we are not well served by having a handful of plutocrats own all the news outlets any more than we are by allowing them freedom from criticism or competition. Both parties may wish to keep the status quo for obvious reasons, but if the Rutgers basketball team had been allowed time to rebut Imus on the air, if the people and organizations maligned by right wing talk radio hit men were allowed the same right to the public ear that Clear Channel and Rupert Murdock have purchased, it might be a better and better informed world and it might reduce the power of people like Al Sharpton to grind their own axes.

The fear of course, boils down to the threat to the propaganda machines of both parties, but the Republicans stand to loose a great deal if the public is allowed to talk back to Limbaugh. It's far less likely that any form of fairness doctrine would result in the FCC taking someone off the air for political reasons, in my opinion, than the possibility that Ann and Rush, fond as they are of talking about responsibility, might have to take responsibility for their words. Wouldn't that be nice?

White men can't jump?

Oh bullshit. Imus should be fired the day after Chris Rock or Dave Chapelle get fired for making jokes about white people and Korean people. He should go off the air after CNN goes off the air for calling every woman over 50 "granny" or Bill Maher gets fired (again) for making diaper jokes about people 10 years older than he is or making rude comments about fat people. Did anyone try to shut down Billy Graham's "crusade" after he agreed with Nixon that "Jews are ruining the country?"

He is no better or worse than the endless mass produced stream of rappers calling women bitches and whores and anyone who took no offense at Archie Bunker making Polish jokes about his son in law, yet thinks Imus should be canned, should be caned.

I don't watch Imus. I don't think he's funny and his weird way of talking annoys me, but although his attempt to emulate the patter one hears from other people who get rich talking that way was tasteless, tastelessness is the rule in nearly every aspect of American life. If every group of people were able to get anyone fired for ridiculing them, we would have no editorials and damn little news. While I would delight in seeing Rush Limbaugh fired for insulting our entire species, I like freedom far too much to allow people like Al Sharpton to censor the media and as much as I like and contribute to the NAACP, I think they should stick to expressing their displeasure and stop calling for the destruction of anyone making a stupid joke.

Scarborough unfair

"During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? . . .superstition, bigotry and persecution."

James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance

Joe Scarborough is a riot - not because he has a sense of humor but because he doesn't. I normally Tivo Bill Maher's show on HBO and watch it on Sunday, so my disgust with Scarborough's idiocy du jour is a bit late, but as his pet theme is currently making its way through the American consciousness like some kind of pestilence, it's never too late to comment.

Joe tells us in all smugness that there is a "cottage industry" involved in "annoying Christians" and of course the comment was directed at fellow rationalist Maher who never hesitates to tell us he doesn't believe in the invisible man; Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim. I guess that annoys Christians, or at least those Scarborough identifies as Christians, which he seems to do without any awareness of the vast diversity of Christian beliefs over the millennia. It really annoys him that anyone suspects Jesus did not bodily ascend to heaven and might have the nerve to mention it. It annoys him that anyone disagrees with the peremptory precepts of fundamentalist preachers and he believes others should equally be annoyed at this blatant freedom of speech.

This pleases me no end of course, as Jesus' tolerance notwithstanding, Christianity in its mainstreams has annoyed the hell out of people who dissent, even in small matters, and has done so by killing them, torturing them, persecuting them, excluding them and expelling them. For 1700 years there has been unremitting battle against pagans, heretics, free thinkers, dissenters and adherents of any other religion as well as members of various Christian sects. They continue to annoy people of other beliefs by marginalizing them and attempting to exclude them from public life if they will not acquiesce in the program of Christianist domination rampant in our America of today, constitutional guarantees notwithstanding. Worst of all, the promoters of an evangelical ascendancy sell their aggression as a response to an attack - an attack that consists of not surrendering a basic freedom of religion.

So sorry Joe, I don't believe your crap - not any of it - and I don't believe Jesus did either. I have the right to question, I have the right to disbelieve and I have the right to say so publicly. You don't have the right to be protected from hearing things that question or do not coincide with your beliefs and if you don't like freedom, get the hell out of my country and take the rest of your stupid, sneering, small-minded, superstitious, subhuman tribe to Scarborough Country with you; your cheap hair color and all.

CIA

Constitution Is Abandoned, of course -- did you think it stood for Central Intelligence Agency?

Khaled el-Masri has a similar name to someone the CIA was looking for and so the German Citizen was grabbed in Macedonia, taken to Afghanistan, beaten and tortured for 5 months and then dumped with a "never mind" which is as close to justice he's ever going to get. A Federal Appeals Court refused to hear his case against the CIA because that would render the CIA responsible for its actions and we can't have that. Next thing you know people would be asking King George to be responsible for his actions!

This is a precedent that essentially makes the CIA a nation unto itself responsible only to itself and answerable only to George, Rex Dei Gratia who is himself responsible only to a "higher Father." Can you imagine a country where you are not allowed to defend yourself because the facts are the property of the government and they can deny you the use of them? Don't bother to imagine - the day is here and the country is the United States of America; the day that justice died.

Ban the ban?

The perception that something needs to be done is the mother of many a bad measure. It's a quote I've seen attributed to Daniel Webster. I can't confirm it, but I believe it.

The mayor of Brazonia Texas, for instance, had heard enough of the "N word" around town and having used it himself as many a southern gentleman would have to admit of, he knew it was wrong to use a hate laden epithet against an entire and diverse class of people. Was it an act of naivete that prompted Mayor Ken Corley, apparently a good and decent man, to decide that Brazonia shouldn't tolerate such meanness of speech and should ban the N?

Of course Brazonia thought otherwise, and I think I do too. I don't like "slippery slope" arguments, but legal precedent is of import and such a thing would make other nasty words easier to ban and other words easier to label as nasty. As one local gentleman of apparent African descent pointed out on CNN this morning: "we use it more than they do." If that is true, then the local authorities would be all over the news the first time they fined an African American for using it. Brazonia would be faced not only with having to selectively enforce the law thus not only creating two classes of citizen with different rights, but creating the need to establish a legal test to determine race - a bad measure regardless of its mother. Would such a law require books from Mark Twain to Malcom X to be removed from the library? Not a good idea if you ask me and not a good idea if you ask a constitutional lawyer.

It's true that other countries, like Germany have laws against hate speech or antilocution and one can be fined there for that favorite American one fingered wave, but somehow legal bans on merely ugly speech do not seem to me to be what we are about, or pretend to be about.