Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Minnesota Republican Representative Michele Bachmann loves to appear on FOX News and complain about government spending and those awful liberals who live off the government teat. She’s gone so far as to declare that Americans should slit their wrists rather than allow the U.S. government to expand health care coverage so that fewer of us get sick.

You just knew there was another shoe, didn’t you? Yep, Michele Bachmann has been the recipient of more than a quarter of a million dollars in government subsidies over the past decade.

Whoopsie-doodle!

Day after day, year after year, preacher Barry C. Black keeps on using his pulpit in the Senate, as its official, government-paid chaplain, to agitate in favor of mass conversion to Christianity. Yesterday, Chaplain Black gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate in which he called upon his deity to transform United States Senators so that they would do the bidding of Christian religion: “Cause them to be men and women of integrity, so that our citizens can lead quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and honesty.”

You know, Mr. Black, here in the United States of America we have a little old thing called the First Amendment to the Constitution. It guarantees us freedom of religion, which includes the right to lead lives that don’t fit with your definition of being godly and quiet. I don’t want to live a life in quiet godliness. It may not fit your religious ideals, which call upon everyone but preachers like you to be silent, but I’ll talk back to your continuing violation of the separation of church and state.

It’s an abuse of your power, Barry, to take a public salary and use it to keep pushing your religion. If you must pray using taxpayer money to do it, why don’t you do something useful, and pray for rain in the desert?

The very first instructions in the book that came with my new Frigidaire washing machine were these: “You can be killed or seriously injured if you don’t follow these Important Safety Instructions. Failure to comply with these warnings could result in serious personal injuries.

I’m not a legal expert or anything, but it does not seem like a very good idea to me for an appliance manufacturer to be threatening its customers in this way. Frigidaire, I’ve read the instructions, okay, so you don’t have to be sending your goons after me!

It takes a blue dog to call out a Blue Dog, so the animated dog in this video is stepping forward to say the sad, but clear, truth about the Blue Dog Coalition of Democrats in Congress: They’re doing the exact opposite of the message that got the Democratic Party majorities in both houses of Congress and the White House in 2008. They’re supporting Republican politics the year after the Republicans had their biggest losses in years!

Memo to Blue Dog Democrats: The progressive mission for the 2010 congressional elections is to get every single right wing Blue Dog out of office.

Last Thursday, Florida’s Republican Congressman Ander Crenshaw issued a press release in which he condemned “big government spending”. He worried about how government spending would create more debt, and promised “spending cuts”.

So, guess what Congressman Crenshaw did last Wednesday: He acknowledged that he had submitted two earmarks to increase big government spending.

Sometimes, you can judge a policy by the company it keeps. Who opposes Barack Obama’s expansion of the number of American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan? Progressive organizations like CodePink and United for Peace and Justice.

Who supports Obama’s decision to escalate? Right wingers like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.

Don’t let D.C. Democratic leadership snowball you. The Afghanistan war escalation is anything but progressive.

This morning, I wrote about the news that the EFF has had to file suit to get the Obama Adminstration to respond to Freedom of Information Requests about spying on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook has acknowledged, in a vague kind of way, that it assists the government in spying on its users, but when the EFF sought particulars, the Obama Administration refused to meet its legal obligation to respond.

Part of my response to this news was to write the article here on Irregular Times. I believe that simply spreading information can provoke some people into action.

But what about me? What would my response be? I looked at my own part in this story, at my own account on Facebook. I saw that while Facebook brings me nice bits of little news about friends I’m not in touch with on a regular basis, the service also brings me a lot of irrelevant bits of information that has nothing to do with me or my relationships to my friends. I saw a lot of advertisements and pointless, relatively boring games. I remembered how it used to be, that when I wanted to know something about one of my friends, I talked to them in person, and if I didn’t want to know about something, I just didn’t ask.

I looked at what Facebook was doing for me, and asked myself whether it was worth allowing government spies to have access to information about my social life. The answer: No, Facebook is not worth it.

So, my response to the Obama Administration’s refusal to be honest about its social networking spy operations is this: I’m off Facebook. I have deactivated my account, and I don’t plan on going back.

The sad thing is that a deactivated account is not a deleted account. While deactivating, the following notice came:

“Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends.”

I opted out, of course. Still, I realize that Facebook is keeping all the information I loaded up about my life, and will share that information with government spies if they ever demand it. The deactivation matters, nonetheless: At least I’m not adding new information. My little window in the Facebook panopticon is now shuttered.

Compare Americans’ reactions to two different bits of news that came out today:

1. Tiger Woods might be cheating on his wife.

2. According to audio recordings of an insider meeting between government spy agencies and the corporations that help them do the spying, gathered by Indiana University grad student Christopher Soghoian, the Bush Administration and Obama Administration demanded private GPS data from consumer mobile devices operated by Sprint-Nextel 8 million times over the last year alone.

So, guess which story is among the most popular among blog readers, according to Google Blogsearch.

You know the answer, don’t you?

Hint: Constitutional rights are soooo last century.

In his new book, A Simple Christmas, Mike Huckabee preaches to us all about how we should have a simple life, without commercialization or overindulgence… and then he promotes a limited edition autographed version of the book in leather case with a certificate of authenticity, for a premium price, just in time for us to buy for Christmas!