So true

Heard on The West Wing tonight:

Omnes una manet nox.

The same night awaits us all.

Somehow it's the most consoling thing I can think of considering Bush's latest plans.

Clarity

Here's a comment from AMERICAblog about Bush's plans to nuke Iran (see posts below) as reported by Sy Hersh:

Seymour Hersh is the best source the US has.

If you don't believe Hersh, you are a fool, plain and simple.

If you don't believe W would start WWIII, open the gates of hell and invite the meltdown of the human race, you are not paying attention.

This really sums it up. (And as far as I can tell this story still has not shown up on the CNN website. I keep looking. If anybody has seen it, please let me know. I'd love to be wrong.)

Please just look at this:

Catastrophic presidency

The article I want to share with you today is entitled, "If You Don't Mind, Why Don't You Mind?" Here's an excerpt:

Not a day goes by without some new disclosure, some new bit of headline evidence that the Bush presidency is the most catastrophic presidency in the history of our great country. The consequences of this fact will effect not only yours and my personal future and fortunes, but those of our children and theirs. Where is your sense of indignation?

What can be safely said is this: Poverty is up by nearly 50 percent since this president took office. Somewhere between five and ten million Americans have lost their health insurance. Income inequality is the highest since the 1920s. Real median income has declined five consecutive years, the longest such streak since the Great Depression. And the Bush budget cuts have left Americans with the most threadbare social safety net since that dreadful era.

Almost 30 percent of American manufacturing jobs have been lost over these past five years. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 13 percent of our Gross Domestic Product, while the finance, insurance and real estate sector accounts for greater than 20 percent. Under Bush, moving money around has surpassed making things as the greatest share of our GDP.

Bush inherited massive budget surpluses but has turned those into massive deficits. While our net foreign indebtedness took over 200 years to reach $1 trillion, just since 2001 it has increased by another $3 trillion. While just five years ago our national debt stood at just over $5 trillion, now it stands at over $8 trillion. America has become a rentier nation, living off unearned income and racking up millions more debt every second of every day. Why don’t you mind?

The trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion per year, and the United States is having to borrow more than $2 billion per day to pay for our profligacy. And it is China – our greatest strategic adversary – that loans us much of those sums. Never could anyone have imagined that the most powerful and arguably democratic nation the world has ever known would give its most threatening competitor and the world's largest remaining communist nation such direct control over its economic destiny. Where is your sense of indignation?

It does not matter, not much anyway, to Bush Republicans that their out-of-control spending and their tax cuts for the rich have driven this nation into a downward spiral of debt. The spend-and-spend, big business, cheap labor, big government, socially regressive Republican Party has also become the political vehicle of the radically religious who, believing Jesus is coming at any minute, believe therefore that long-term fiscal responsibility is of little concern, to say nothing of social and environmental responsibility.

And that's just part of it. I really recommend that you click through and read the whole article if you have time. You know, I think sometimes that we've all been desensitized. There have been so many outrages perpetrated by this administration that we no longer able to feel the impact. We need an article like this to see just how bad it really is lest we forget.

Our useless mainstream press

All right. Agence France Presse has reported on the Sy Hersh article I blogged about below. The article is entitled, "US Considers Use of Nuclear Weapons Against Iran". But does CNN mention it on their website?? Noooooo. I wonder just how many ordinary Americans are even aware of the news that has people in the progressive blogosphere absolutely horrified.

Here's part of what the article says:

The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
...
A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war."
...
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.

But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.

"There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.

The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.

"If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle," the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.

Maybe I was wrong in my earlier post. Maybe Bush is not insane. Maybe he is just plain evil.

UPDATE: Here's a comment I found on AMERICAblog about this topic:

Seriously, this could actually destroy the US. One [nuclear] bomb in Iran, and the rest of the world would come together against the US.

And here's another:

The Christian right wants desperately to see the end times. Armageddon, Rapture, etc. Looks like Bush is determined to see that they get it whether God is ready or not. This man and his crowd are beyond scary.

I have to say, I agree with both.

Bush has truly gone mad.

Yes, he's planning on nuking Iran. This is from Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. That's a top name in the news business, folks, in case you didn't know. Go on over to AMERICAblog and read about it right here.

Or check in with the Think Progress article which says this:

A new report by Seymour Hersh finds that senior Bush administration officials are developing plans for a massive attack on Iran which could include nuclear weapons. Hersh points out that the Joint Chiefs of Staff — a panel of the highest-ranking military officials from each branch of the U.S. armed services — are strenuously opposed to the plan, so much so that some have threatened to resign if it goes forward.

Words simply fail me at this point. I truly wonder if the world is going to last much longer.

Confronting the president

Here's what a questioner said to President Bush at a forum in North Carolina (do click on Harry Taylor's name below for a delightful new website):

I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and grace to be ashamed of yourself.

~~Harry Taylor

Double-think

This is very disturbing and very true:

Americans believe very deeply in the ideals that America stands for, will sacrifice their lives and those of their children when necessary to defend them. Yet at the same time, the neo-cons have convinced the public into believing that these ideals are very impractical in dealing with the complexities of today's world. To burden the federal government with our revered Constitution and its checks and balances would cripple it in its difficult fight against terrorism. We must, as they say, sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve them.

~~Eliot J. Chandler

More on the coming theocracy

Well, the Air Force Academy is in the news again. About a year ago or so I posted about the pressure put on cadets to adopt a fundamentalist Christian faith. Here's what's been happening lately as reported in an article entitled, "The Air Force soars to the (religious) right":

The Air Force recently released new guidelines on religious expression. The guidelines come after several investigations that documented a lack of religious tolerance at the Air Force Academy. Consequently, last year the Air Force issued revised guidelines that struck a good balance between the right to free speech and religious toleration. But evangelical Christian organizations and members of Congress complained, prompting the Air Force to issue new guidelines that pander to the religious right.

In 2005 the Air Force received numerous complaints of religious discrimination, coercion, and intolerance at the prestigious Air Force Academy, where an elite group of young cadets are trained to become officers. In response to the complaints an Air Force review board investigated the academy. The board's report maintained that although there was "no overt religious discrimination" there had been instances of "insensitivity," which was putting it mildly.

Cadets were asked to sign a message affirming, "Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the world." Although the academy had 19 clubs for religious organizations, an atheist cadet was not allowed to form a club for "Freethinkers." A chaplain at the academy routinely told students that if they didn't believe in Christ they would "burn in hell." The commandant of the academy, Brigadier General Johnny Weida, wrote a military chant for the cadets that proclaimed "Jesus Rocks." The football team's locker room contained a banner stating, "I am a Christian first and last, I am a member of Team Jesus." Jewish cadets were told that the Holocaust was revenge for killing Christ.

These and other instances were obviously much more than merely religious insensitivity. They prompted the Air Force to release revised guidelines of religious _expression last year. To its credit, the Air Force struck the appropriate balance between the right to free speech and religious tolerance with the guidelines. In fact, it's this balance that offended evangelical Christians.

The conservative organization Focus on the Family asked its members to complain to President Bush about the guidelines. The organization released a statement characterizing the investigation of the academy and the revision of the guidelines as a "ridiculous bias of a few against the religion of the majority -- Christianity." More than 70 members of Congress signed a letter asking President Bush to publicly criticize the guidelines and to issue an executive order that would have military chaplains invoke the name of Jesus during prayers at public ceremonies.

As a result of the criticism, the Air Force caved in and recently released new guidelines clearly intended to appease the religious right.

Then this point is made at the end of the article:

The U.S. government, and in particular the military, is facing its worst public image abroad in almost half a century. Much of this has been created by a perception in the Muslim world that the military does not respect religious freedom and tolerance. The charges made against the Air Force, and the subsequent influence of evangelical Christians, only reinforces this perception. If the military isn't free from religious coercion at home, there's little reason for foreign nations to hope that their beliefs will be respected.

It is very disturbing to think that an entire branch of the military has been pressured to convert to one specific theological viewpoint of one specific religion. You know, I don't think liberal Episcopalians would fit in at the Air Force Academy. It won't be long before we don't fit in anywhere in this country if the religious right has its way.

Friday cat blogging!

Leroy

Photo by Ellie Finlay

Supressing science

I came across an article from the Washington Post today entitled, "Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House". Here's an excerpt:

Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

These scientists -- working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. -- say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, point climate researchers -- unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters -- were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.

"There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated -- I see that."

So how, I want to know, is suppressing the facts supposed to help? Will muzzling the scientists stop the ice from melting, the seas from rising, the polar bears from drowning, the Canadian wolves from dying of starvation (because the carribou don't have ice to walk across)? Is gagging the scientists going to stop hurricanes from being more severe, is it going to stop the famiine and drought that will be the inevitable result of global warming? Most frightening of all, is it going to stop the plankton (the basis of the food chain in the oceans) from dying off?

The people in this administration are suffering from a severe case of the mind poison of delusion. I just hope that some day they are made aware of the enormity of what they have done.

Perfect snark

I love it:

Indicted former Republican majority leader Tom DeLay announced he is resigning from Congress and he will not run for re-election. People were shocked. A Republican with an exit plan? ... They say this will be the first time Tom DeLay actually takes a vacation he pays for himself.

--Jay Leno

Mainstream media bias

I really get tired of the right-leaning bias of the mainstream media. I'm directing you, therefore, to Media Matters again today to take a look at an article about a recent example. Here's the summary:

Just days after the Democratic Party released a national security plan, CNN host Wolf Blitzer and NBC Today host Matt Lauer simply ignored the release and allowed -- and even encouraged -- Republican guests to suggest the Democrats have no "agenda." This continues patterns by CNN and Today of largely ignoring the Democrats' security plan, despite repeatedly reporting or commenting on the Democratic Party's purported lack of clear alternatives to the Republicans.

I do recommend checking in with Media Matters from time to time. It's really an eye-opener.

Oh my God, there's another one.

Sexual predator connected with the Department of Homeland Security, that is. You will notice that I posted below about Brian J. Doyle's arrest on mulitiple counts of using a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor. Now read this posting entitled, "Former Top DHS Child Porn Official a Sex Criminal?"

Oh, my goodness.

As I noted earlier, a senior Homeland Security Department law enforcement agent was busted last October for exposing himself to a girl in the food court of a mall.

Next to the recent arrest of DHS spokesman Brian Doyle on child sex charges, this was just one more reason to take Operation Predator away from DHS, I said. "Predator" is the agency's program to bust child sex criminals.

Now we discover -- that law enforcement agent, Frank Figueroa, used to run Operation Predator.

The victim, a 16-year-old girl, said Figueroa pulled up a leg of his shorts, exposed himself and masturbated for about 10 minutes, according to the Tampa Tribune.

Figueroa was in court this morning; he pleaded no contest to charges of exposure of sexual organs and disorderly conduct He had formerly said he was not guilty. His trial is expected to begin tomorrow.

What is it going to take to bring this administration down? The outrages just keep coming.

Love and power

Interesting source:

When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have peace.

--Jimi Hendrix

Ah, the party of family values

If this doesn't disgust you, I don't know what will. The article is entitled, "Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary arrested". Here's what's happened:

Brian J. Doyle, DOB 4/7/50, the Deputy Press Secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., was arrested this evening [April 4, 206] at his residence in Silver Springs, Maryland, on 23 Polk County charges related to the use of a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor. Doyle's arrest is the result of a joint investigation by the Polk County Sheriff s Office, working with Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Jerry Hill s office, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General s Office.
...
On many occasions, Doyle instructed the victim, whom he believed to be a 14-year-old girl, to perform a sexual act while thinking of him, and described explicit and perverse sexual acts he wished to have with her, in addition to sending her numerous obscene .mpg files (digital movies). He also had sexually explicit telephone conversations with a detective posing as a child on his office line and cell phone. He attempted to seduce the girl during their online chats, encouraging her to purchase a web cam so that she could send graphic images of herself to him, and promised her that he would likewise send nude photos of himself. Many of the conversations he initiated with the victim are too extraordinary and graphic for public release.

I am so sick of these sanctimonious Republicans who going around acting like prudes all the while harboring sexual deviants like this piece of slime. It's time they got their house in order before self-righteously preaching abstinence to the rest of the populace.

Speaking of sanctimony, look at what the New York Times has to say about the abstinence policy and the fight against AIDS:

Insistence by Republican Congressional leaders that American money to fight the spread of AIDS globally be used to emphasize abstinence and fidelity is undercutting comprehensive and widely accepted aid models, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Tuesday.

The report by the G.A.O., an investigative arm of Congress, examines the effect of a mandate from Congress that at least a third of United States money to prevent the spread of AIDS worldwide be devoted to sexual abstinence and fidelity programs.

It found that the provision had limited the reach of broader strategies to fight AIDS that include the use of condoms — a conclusion strongly contested by a senior Bush administration official. The report also said the requirement had meant that officials in some countries have had to reduce spending on programs to prevent the transmission of H.I.V. from women to their newborn babies, as well as other prevention strategies.

I really wish someone would do some scientific research to find out if Republicans are really more sexually virtuous than the rest of us. Numbers, do you hear? I want NUMBERS. I mean hard, cold statistics. (We already know that divorce rates are higher in the red states than in the blue. We also know that extra prostitutes had to be imported into New York City to meet the high demand during the Republican National Convention.) Then I want everyone who's on the receiving end of Republican self-righteousness to throw those numbers back in their smug faces.

UPDATE: Well, I'm not having to wait long for my research. This isn't replete with statistical analysis, mind you, but it's hard evidence all the same. Go read the Reuters articled entitled, "Sex tourism thriving in Bible Belt". They're talking about Atlanta here - not Bangkok:

"Men fly in, are met by pimps, have sex with a 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family," said Sanford Jones, the chief juvenile judge of Fulton County, Georgia.

A new federal law passed in 2003 ensures that American sex tourists landing on foreign soil and hiring prostitutes under the age of 18 can get 30 years in prison.

But in Georgia, punishment for pimping or soliciting sex with a girl under 18 is only five to 20 years, according to Deborah Espy, the Deputy District Attorney of Fulton County.

"Men are coming to Atlanta to have sex with a child," said LaKendra Baker, project manager for the Center to End Adolescent Sexual Exploitation (CEASE).

Half of the street-level prostitutes in Atlanta are believed to be under 18, according to experts.

And the right-wingers have a fit about what consenting adults do in private and want to prevent loving, faithful, gay and lesbian partners from adopting children, getting insurance benefits and having visitation rights in hospitals. They should be ashamed.

Our nation

This is very sobering:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

~~Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Archbishop of Canterbury on climate change

Rowan Williams is finally speaking out where it counts. As you know, I'm seriously disappointed in him for selling gays down the river with his pandering to the reactionary conservatives within the Anglican Communion. But we won't have an Anglican Communion to worry about if we don't have an earth that is habitable. The article is entitled, "Dr Williams: Billions could die from climate change" and here are some passages:

Moral responsibility lay with "absolutely everybody - not only in terms of examining our own lifestyle, but in sending a message to governments that it is recognised as a priority by the public," he said. He described as "profoundly immoral" a policy and lifestyle that did not consider future generations.

He said that the question was to some extent about who was prepared to take responsibility, but it was also about the "changes we can make, and which each organisation can make, too". He noted: "That's something the Church of England is having to look at quite seriously in just those terms: we can't talk about it in the abstract, as if we occupied the high moral ground."
...
Dr Williams was explicitly critical of the United States, and implicitly critical of President Bush. "I don't think it's compatible with the Christian ethic to ignore the environmental degradation that we face - it's a medium-term question for everyone, and therefore a moral imperative," he said. "Nearly a quarter of carbon emissions on the face of the globe are attributable to the United States, and the leadership in the US has been very slow to catch up with us.
...
When asked how God would judge those leaders who had not moved quickly enough to prevent the millions, and perhaps billions, of deaths that he had forecast earlier in the interview, Dr Williams reflected: "I think if we look at the language of the Bible on this, we very often come across situations where people are judged for not responding to warnings.

"It's very deeply built in. There are choices we can make, each one of us, to change things now, and I think what the Bible and the Christian tradition suggests is that those who have that challenge put before them - and not only that challenge, but the evidence for it - and don't respond bear a very heavy responsibility before God."

Whether you believe in God or not, I think we can all agree with the Archbishop that those who have the challenge put before them and choose not to respond bear a very heavy responsibility to whatever is ultimately good, true and right. Future generations - if there are future generations - will rise up and curse us for what we are allowing to take place.

That "war on Christians" again

The article I want to share with you today is called, "What war on Christians? and it makes the point that the people who are really discriminated against in this country are the non-religious:

Attempts to portray Christians as a beleaguered minority are particularly ludicrous since, outside a few elite enclaves, prejudice against the nonreligious remains widely accepted in America. Half of Americans agree that belief in God is necessary to having good moral values, and more than two-thirds say they would not even consider voting for a nonbeliever for political office. Georgia state legislator Ron Foster ruffled no feathers a few years ago when he noted, in defense of posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, that judges or public officials who don't believe in God are "more likely to be corrupt."

This soft bigotry has consequences, and not just for godless politicians. In the May issue of New York University Law Review, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh documents discrimination against nonreligious parents in child custody disputes, based on the assumption that raising your children in a religious faith makes you a better parent.

To be sure, there are atheists who are militantly hostile to all religion, and reinforce negative stereotypes of nonbelievers. But there are also believers who give the faithful a bad name -- like the whiners and zealots who wring their hands about a mythical "war on Christians."

Of course, as a liberal Episcopalian I'm the kind of Christian that the right wingers say is "not really a Christian". That's fine. I don't want to be identified with the wingnuts anyway.

That right wing persecution complex

All right, you know, don't you, that the evangelicals and fundamentalists are going around saying there's a "war on Christians". They love to play the victim when they're not allowed to shove their religion down other people's throats. Here's an article called, "Christian Wars" you might like to read to catch up on what it's all about. Check out this exerpt:

In keeping the congregations of believers riled up, the fear-mongers keep the level of outrage high, the introspective thinking low, and most important, the money flowing into the coffers. The emphasis on fear, the creation of enemies and false crises, and the resulting anger and discord are the tools of the fear-mongers, and are used to often devastating effect in mainline churches being overrun by hardliners.

The important thing to note here is that it never stops. The foes are never vanquished, the mission is never accomplished, there is no acknowledgement of victory or success, however minor. The war and fear-mongers keep hitting their congregations with crisis after crisis, keeping them in a constant state of arousal and imbalance. It is the tactic used by the shock troops of the Religious Right, and one we need to thoroughly understand in order to reduce its efficiency.

Fear makes people irrational. It erodes health, well being, and wealth, too. In the US, the most common way to abate fear is to spend money. So, the fear-afflicted congregations are throwing money at their leaders, giving them the means to continue the fight until the next pledge drive. It is a never ending circle.

To break this cycle, and end this artificial war, we must find a way to quell the fear. We need to find the means to calm and awaken the fear-addled and constantly embattled congregations and believers to this misuse of faith. We need to show them that they are being constantly enraged by create false crises, and ghost enemies, which are used to ultimately deprive them of their money- and their spiritual well being.

This false war isn't going to end overnight. The war and fear-mongers will make enemies of anyone who tries to stop them, enraging and exciting their flocks to even greater outrage.

Christ talked about false prophets and wolves who do these things. There is an enemy, but it isn't those who are outside the church. Instead, the enemy is within their own numbers, using their trust -and fear- to exploit them.

There is no outside war on Christians in the US. There is no secular or liberal plot to destroy religion. In fact, it is clear that the secular culture has provided a rich medium of tolerance that has allowed the hate and fear of the hardliners to blossom into this false 'war'.

Actually, there is a war going on. But it's a war on tolerance. The fundies will not be happy until they can impose their version of Christianity on the rest of us and they will not stop until they do so. I'm afraid I'm pessimistic about this war. I think the fundies are going to win - at least for a while. We have entered a new dark age. It probably will need to run its course before it's over.