Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Immunity, immunity, immunity. I am sick of hearing members of Congress talk about how important it is to protect telecommunications corporations by giving them legal immunity. They say that there ought to be retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that broke the law by handing over huge amounts of private information about the personal communications of millions of Americans to George W. Bush.

Why? Why should telecommunications companies be placed above the law? Why should they be given a get out of jail free card when they break the public trust?

What about us - you know, the customers? Why aren’t members of Congress worried about protecting us?

The telecommunications corporations promised to keep our personal information secret. They entered into legal agreements with us, guaranteeing that we could use their communications services in private, without worrying that people would be able to look through our emails, listening to our telephone calls, and watching us surf the web.

Yet, that kind of spying against us Americans is exactly what the telecommunications corporations did, and it’s what they continue to do. It’s one of the kinds of spying against Americans that now will continue under the FISA Amendments Act.

But, the members of Congress who voted for the FISA Amendments Act don’t seem to care about that. They don’t care that millions of Americans were illegally betrayed. No, all they care aut is the comfort of the big telecommunications corporations.

Luckily, there are a few members of the House of Representatives who have had the integrity to speak up for us, the American people, the customers of the abusive telecommunications corporations. One of those members of Congress is John Hall, who represents the Hudson River Valley in the House of Representatives.

After reading the text of the FISA Amendments Act, Congressman Hall spoke on behalf of the right of customers whose private lives were invaded to seek justice in a court of law:

“The rule of law lies at the core of America’s founding principles, and the language in this bill was too weak to ensue that any breach of our laws that may have occurred under the warrantless wiretapping program will be fully addressed. It is not appropriate to deny Americans the right to pursue these matters in court, or to short-circuit the judicial review that lies at the heart of our system of checks and balances, which is the bedrock of our Constitution. Accordingly, I voted against this bill.”

Thank you, John Hall, for showing that there is at least one member of Congress who remembers that the Constitution was written to protect people, not corporations.

In the context of Barack Obama running for President and everything, with questions about the worthiness of his Christian church, or whether he’s a secret genetic Muslim, I thought it would be important to bring news of a pretty shocking statement that a radical black activist made about “religious bigotry”.

He said, “We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry.”

Well, how dare he say such a thing, insulting religious people like that!? He must be just an elitist who, as Hillary Clinton said of Barack Obama, doesn’t understand the importance of faith in ordinary people’s lives! How could we allow someone who could insult religious people, saying that people of faith are nothing but bigots, to go anywhere near the White House?

Oh, the inhumanity! Oh, the pathos! Oh, the outrage! Guard your women and children!

You won’t believe it when you hear who this radical black activist leader is. Did you know that he spent time behind bars? Hmm. Wait a minute… where did I put his name?

Oh, never mind. You can find out here.

Dear, oh dear. It is an outrage, isn’t it?

Roger and Gallet Paris, which is actually headquartered not in Paris, but in Monmouth, New Jersey, produces a “gentle nature shampoo”.

Where in nature are the shampoos found? I could save some money by going to get some there, maybe, if it’s somewhere near me.

I’d hate to contribute to an ecological crisis, though, by taking too much shampoo out of its natural environment.

I am so sick and tired of hearing people say that the sky is falling, and talk about global warming as if it is actually taking place. Why do they keep suppressing the truth? Why won’t they let the public hear about the real scientific measurements that are taking place?

There is an alternative hypothesis that the liberal media never talks about: The Solar Hypothesis. The Solar Hypothesis acknowledges that there was a period of warming, but observes that temperatures in many places on Earth are now actually cooling! It’s true! It’s happening right now, and if you don’t believe me, then I challenge you to start observing temperatures yourself instead of just accepting what Al Gore is telling you.

The Solar Hypothesis holds that there are cycles of warming and cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere, but that these cycles of warming and cooling happen because of differences in the intensity of energy from the Sun as it hits the Earth, not because of human pollution.

The truth that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know is that temperatures all across the United States have been getting cooler for a long time now - for months, since late August last year.

Will there be a warming trend after this cooling trend is done? Sure. That’s only natural. In fact, scientists who adhere to the Solar Hypothesis predict that there will be a short warming trend starting sometime soon and extending to the end of July, all across the Northern Hemisphere.

But, right now, there is a cooling trend, not global warming! This cooling trend is part of a cycle, which real scientists understand. It gets warmer, and colder, and warmer again. Nothing to worry about.

This morning, for example, there was a region-wide warming trend, and maybe that’s what the global warming econuts are all worried about. But, there is a current cooling trend. The Solar Hypothesis predicts this, noting that the effect of the sun is getting weaker right now, and is weakening all the time. At 6:05, as I write this, the temperature is about 45 degrees, but by the end of the night, it could well be below freezing!

Take that, Al Gore. How is that global warming? The temperature is getting colder, you envirofascist!

Never mind what the scientific establishment says about this study and that study. You know, you can get research to say anything you want to. You can trust me because I’m asking you to think logically, and I trust your intelligence, unlike those pointy headed university welfare cases.

Just look around you and think. While you slept last night, dreaming the Green dreams that the Earth Firsters put into your head, the USA was getting colder, not warmer! Well, how could it be getting cooler if there is global warming?

You know the answer. It can’t! Global warming is a hoax.

For the benefit of readers who don’t know me: Wink!

Two dangerous events have taken place in Manhattan recently. First, there was the bombing. A guy rode up on a bicycle and set a bomb to go off outside of a military recruiting center when no one would be there. It was a little bomb, a big firecracker, really. It broke the glass on a window and a door. The bomber lost his bicycle.

Homeland Security went on high alert trying to find the bicyclist. It was the top story for three days.

Then, there was the crane. Today, a big crane in New York City fell over. It hit a bunch of apartment buildings. At least 4 people are dead.

No one’s saying that we have to give up the freedoms of the Bill of Rights because of the accident with the crane. Lots of people have spent several years working hard to get rid of the freedoms of the Bill of Rights to protect Americans from bombers, who haven’t been able to do much but break windows.

Why the difference in reaction? Why are people so ready to freak out when it comes to a bomb that doesn’t do much damage, but just shrug when it’s a crane that kills people?

It’s a clear contradiction of the political narrative that’s been presented by faith-based hacks in the Democratic and Republican Party. Even as they have been claiming that the United States is growing more religious, the just-released Pew Forum Religious Landscape Survey shows the opposite. “The biggest gains due to changes in religious affiliation have been among those who say they are not affiliated with any particular religious group or tradition,”, the report on the survey’s results says.

The Pew study contains a category of Americans it calls “unaffiliated”. Included in this group are those Americans who call themselves atheists or agnostics, and those Americans who respond that their religious affiliation is “nothing in particular”. Of this “nothing in particular” group, a little more than half are non-religious (called “secular”), and a little less than half are vaguely religious but not affiliated with any religion.

In a lot of areas of the report, the Pew Forum seems to edge away from reporting on atheists, agnostics and the secular unaffiliated. It’s as if the people at the Pew Forum don’t really know what to make of this group, given that they’re dedicated to examining “religion and public life” - not people who are apart from religion.

Some things are clear, however. Christians are older than the population in general, with fewer adherents of Christianity in the newest generation of adults. Atheists, agnostics, and secular unaffiliated Americans, on the other hand, are more abundant in the new generation of American adults.

In the general population, 20 percent of people are in the age range of 18-29 year-olds. 37 percent of atheists, however, are aged 18-29. 34 percent of agnostics are in that age range, and 29 percent of secular unaffiliated Americans are. No religious group shows anything like that high percentage of representation by the young.

That this age dynamic is a generational shift, and not the reflection of some kind of permanent dynamic in which young people start out as non-religious and then become religious later in life, is indicated by the relatively low percentage of adults leaving the religiously unaffiliated groups.

This is one area in which the Pew Forum does not differentiate between secular and religious unaffiliated. I’m sorry that I can’t fully describe these numbers. Call the Pew Forum to complain. What I can say, based upon their statistics, is that more far people become atheists as adults than leave their atheist identity behind. The same is true for agnostics, and for people who say that their religious affiliation is “nothing in particular”.

The number of people who currently say they were atheists as children is only a third of the number of people who currenly say that they are atheists as adults. Agnostics show a doubling of numbers in the move from childhood to adulthood, and generally unaffiliated Americans show a tripling in numbers. Catholics and Protestants, on the other hand, tend to lose some adherents as they age.

So, it seems that non-religious identity is something that Americans tend to mature into, and Christian identity is something that Americans tend to mature out of - although some members of all groups retain their identity lifelong.

This trend in maturation, combined with the disproportionately young character of non-religious Americans, suggests that the new generation is distinctly more non-religious than previous generations, and that this generation will probably remain more non-religious than its predecessors.

This trend ought to serve as a wakeup call for politicians to pull back on the kind of religious pandering we’ve seen so much of during the 2008 presidential election so far. Atheists, agnostics and non-religious secular Americans make up 10.3 percent of the population.

That means that non-religious Americans are a larger group than Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Unitarians, New Agers, Quakers, Pagans, Wiccans, and religiously-active members of Judaism and Native American tribes combined.

There are almost as many non-religious Americans as there are evangelical Baptists. Episcopals are puny in number compared to non-religious Americans. So are Methodists, Congregationalists, Orthodox Christians, Presbyterians, and Seventh Day Adventists.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both spent a lot of time courting the support of what are called “historically black churches” in the Pew Forum survey. However, non-religious Americans easily outnumber the people affiliated with those churches.

Catholics? Well, yes, Catholics outnumber non-religious Americans a little bit more than two-to-one. However, the Catholic portion of the population of the United States is in sharp decline, whereas the non-religious portion of the US population is strongly increasing.

Pay attention, politicians - non-religious Americans are on the rise. The days when our right to equal protection under the law can be ignored are numbered.

I was just having a conversation about the 2008 presidential election, and the reasons that so many people have decided to support Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Some people might express it in terms of which candidate is better able to strongly campaign against John McCain. Bill Clinton himself has said that Hillary Clinton and John McCain are such great friends that any campaign between the two of them would probably put voters to sleep if they ran against each other. Bill Clinton couldn’t seem to understand that such a thing would be unattractive to Democrats.

What the trouble of a Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain presidential campaign boils down to, however, is that Hillary Clinton is just too much like John Kerry. She’s got the same vulnerabilities, the same indefensible position of criticizing the Iraq War while refusing to say that it was a mistake to start the war, and having gone along with Bush’s whole Iraq invasion idea from the start. Hillary Clinton was for the Iraq War before she was against it.

Not Barack Obama. Barack Obama was against the Iraq War before he was against the Iraq War.

We’ve been writing about the Protect America Act here at Irregular Times now for about six months, so our regular readers know the danger of the law, which allows functionally unrestricted electronic spying against American citizens by the U.S. government. The FISA Amendments Act, which would renew the Protect America Act, and make its spy powers permanent, is now being debated in the Senate, but an equivalent law, only lacking telecommunications corporate immunity, has already been passed.

Though that House vote is done with, there still is something that can be done about it. Punish the Democrats who betrayed the American people by voting in favor of government spying against us.

In Georgia, one of the congressional Democrats who has been targeted by outraged Democratic voters is Representative Jim Marshall. Jim Marshall has a long record of collaboration with the Bush Republicans. He voted for Patriot Act, and the Military Commissions Act, and for starting the Iraq War too. Whenever a vital vote comes up in Congress, Jim Marshall falls in with the failed ideology of George W. Bush.

Democrat Robert Nowak has stood up to challenge Jim Marshall in this year’s congressional primary. But, is Nowak a better Democrat than Jim Marshall? Oh, you bet he is.

Here’s what Robert Nowak has to say about Jim Marshall’s support for the Protect America Act, and its programs of government spying against law-abiding American citizens:

“The latest demand from President Bush, that the US Congress shield telecommunication providers from liability for breaking federal law, is a real step backwards in the important mission of authorizing an effective intelligence surveillance program. Congress should not give blanket immunity for any unlawful acts, and it should renew its call for increased oversight of the telecom providers that may have broken federal surveillance laws.

Further, the US Congress must not budge in insisting that any surveillance program with the capability of eavesdropping on US citizens be subject to court oversight.

Congress should insist on codifying in the statute a court order requirement for any surveillance done on American citizens.

This last August, Representative Marshall voted for a temporary bill that allowed for expanded wiretapping and surveillance on Americans without a court order. Allowing that regime to continue is unacceptable.”

The sadistic absurdity of the refusal by George W. Bush and U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to admit that waterboarding is torture has been exposed to the unkind spotlight of reality again, this time by the Bush Administration’s own Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell. McConnell, who along with Mukasey is given the authority by the Protect America Act to conduct massive, unsupervised operations of electronic spying against the American people, has told the New Yorker magazine that yes, by golly, if he were subjected to waterboarding, he would personally regard it as torture.

However, McConnell refused to provide an official legal opinion stating as much. That would subject lots of people in the U.S. government to criminal prosecution, he explained.

How sad that Michael McConnell’s only moral scruples are exercised to protect people who conduct techniques that he regards as torture.

How can American citizens sit so contentedly with such a person as their nation’s Spy-In-Chief?

The recently budding elitist echo story about how great it would be if a billionaire could run for President on the basis of his having a lot of money and the support of a group of powerful Washington D.C. insiders is based upon the assumption that the American people have very short memories. Given my experience in discussing political issues with other Americans, that’s a pretty safe assumption. It’s a sadly calculating foundation for a presidential campaign, though.

The billionaire is, of course, Michael Bloomberg. Think about it now… as you’ve gone about your daily business, have you ever heard anybody say, “Oh, if only Michael Bloomberg would run for President!” Of course you haven’t. That’s why Bloomberg will need his billions of dollars to spend on television advertisements, to try to convince you that you’ve just been dying to hand over power to him.

The thing about Michael Bloomberg, is that for all his talk about “unity”, he complains a lot about problems made by bad people. Which bad people? Well, Mikey never says, exactly… because… he’s one of them.

Today, at Politico, Bloomberg was quoted as whining, “People have stopped working together, government is dysfunctional. … There’s no accountability today,!”

The government is dysfunctional? Michael Bloomberg helped to put the government into place, remember? He sent out his New York City police to infiltrate groups of anti-Bush protesters, to spy on them and bring the information back to New York City Republican headquarters. He did it for George W. Bush, his big buddy in the White House.

Remember 2004. George W. Bush and Michael Bloomberg were the best of friends. It’s only since the Republican Party became unpopular that Bloomberg has tried to re-cast himself as an independent.

Independent. Oh, sure. A big city mayor with immense personal riches and Wall Street connections who first was a Democrat, and then a Republican, and then neither. When Mike Bloomberg says “independent”, what he means is “opportunistic”.

Opportunistic, like a rat jumping from a sinking ship, now telling us that he’s been with us all on dry land all along.

Beware of billionaires who complain that the system isn’t working. Their idea of a solution will be worse than the problem.

Here at Irregular Times, we aim for substance over style.

Just this once, however, I couldn’t resist. Seeing the photo of Matt Stoller with Mitt Romney over at Open Left, I found the answer to a question that has been dogging many a political junkie this year: How does Mitt Romney keep his helmet hair just so?

Now it can be told: Hair gel. Just look at that shine. It looks like an entire tube of hair glop goes into Romney’s hair at least twice a week.

After all, what does a little thing like logical incoherence on energy policy matter to the American public, when compared to hair?

It makes Romney “Reaganesque”, see.

Since when is Reaganesque a good thing?

Since Mitt Romney is running for the United States of Hair?

Oh, the folly of follicles. Evolutionarily, we should have gone past the point of using hair as a good indication of adaptability.

Oooh. Bumper sticker idea: Mitt is Maladaptive

Ron Paul has his own religious beliefs that lead him to oppose abortion, even of a fertilized egg. That’s his right to believe things like that, but when it comes to government policy, the fact is that Americans have the legal right to get an abortion. The problem with Ron Paul’s attitude is that he wants to use the power of government to enforce his own particular religious beliefs about abortion.

For example, Ron Paul is intent on inflicting his religious beliefs about reproductive health on Peace Corps volunteers. Peace Corps volunteers are among the best that our country has to offer to the rest of the world, but Ron Paul wants to force them to accept second rate health care for the time of their service. Ron Paul has introduced legislation into the House of Representatives that would forbid the government from transporting Peace Corps volunteers to receive abortions, essentially forcing them to give birth, even if they have been raped, if they are serving in a country where abortion is not available.

It’s shameful for Ron Paul to abuse the sacrifices made by Peace Corps Volunteers by withholding health care services from them in the midst of their sacrifice.

(Source: Library of Congress)

Mike Huckabee loves to tell people about how he is an ordained Southern Baptist minister. What he has been more reluctant to share is that he took tens of thousands of dollars from a cigarette company while he was Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas.

Forty thousand dollars is more than what many Americans make from an entire year of work, but it’s what Mike Huckabee got for making just one speech in front of the group representing a secret source of money, which was in turn funded by a cigarette company. Huckabee claims not to have known about that, but witnesses place him meeting with an executive from the cigarette company about the fund and where its money came from.

Taking money from big corporations while he was in public office was no big deal, says Huckabee. If that kind of payoff is okay with you, then Mike Huckabee for President may just be your favorite campaign. If not, vote for a clean, progressive candidate for President instead.

(Source: Newsweek, December 17, 2007)

Back in 1998, asked by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette why he left being a Southern Baptist preacher to become a politician, Mike Huckabee said, “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.”

I’m confused. Mike Huckabee and his ilk say that the United States is a Christian nation. If that’s true, why do they need to take the United States back for Christ?

Furthermore, I’d like to know who Mike Huckabee thinks he’s taking the nation back from. It seems that Mike Huckabee thinks that Non-Christians should have America taken away from them.

Finally, what “alarm clock” is Mike Huckabee talking about? Is he one of those people who thinks that the End Times of Armageddon are just around the corner? How is that a part of his decision to enter politics? Does Mike Huckabee intend to pursue public policies from the White House that are designed to facilitate the End Times in order to bring Jesus back from the dead in the End Times?

It appears that Mike Huckabee’s design upon entering politics was theocratic from the start.

(Source: Arkansas Democrat Gazette, June 8, 1998)

Ron Paul’s answer to the question, “What do you see as the role of the Environmental Protection Agency?”: He said, “You wouldn’t need it.”

Really? You wouldn’t need the EPA? So, we don’t need the work the EPA is doing to stop arsenic and PCBs and mercury and raw sewage from entering our rivers? We don’t need the work that the EPA is doing to control acid rain, or smog? We just don’t need it?

I suspect that what Ron Paul meant to say is that big corporations wouldn’t need the EPA. That’s precisely why we don’t need Ron Paul as President.

(Source: Grist, October 16, 2007)

Had cancer? Got multiple sclerosis? How about diabetes?

If you’ve had any medical troubles in the past, and we get a Republican elected President in 2008, then you’re out of luck. People with pre-existing conditions just wouldn’t be covered under the health care plans proposed by the top Republican presidential candidates.

“People with preexisting conditions would not be able to get coverage or would not be able to afford it,” says economist Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “Unless it’s in a state that has very strong consumer protections, they would likely be denied coverage.”

New York’s senior US Senator, Charles Schumer, just lost my vote. He is supporting the nomination of Michael Mukasey to become Attorney General of the United States, even though Mukasey flatly refused to tell the U.S. Senate whether he will regard waterboarding is a form of torture.

The problems are twofold:

1. Michael Mukasey directly insulted the right of the Senate to practice oversight and to be anything but a rubber stamp in the confirmation process
2. Michael Mukasey has implicitly endorsed a form of torture. That’s illegal. The new Attorney General of the United States is going to be endorsing, if not directing, criminal behavior on the part of the government.

Thanks to Charles Schumer, this will pass. Senator Schumer makes a weak Senate the new status quo.

This is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It started with Chuck Schumer’s decision to help George W. Bush start a war in Iraq, and goes downhill to this point.

Senator Chuck Schumer is now on the record as supporting torture.

Thanks for nothing, Senator Schumer.

I will support any progressive who runs for Senate in 2010. I will not support Chuck Schumer. He does not represent the values of New York State.

Last night, one of our regular visitors came upon an article I wrote pointing out that right wing oversight of the economy has proven to be a threat, not just to the US economy, but to the global economy as well. The visitor, being something of a right winger himself, felt called upon to express outrage, but could not come up with a substantive response.

So, the outraged visitor decided to use a tried-and-not-so-true debating tactic: Suggesting that if a person does not support something, the only alternative is support for the extreme opposite position. In this particular case, the visitor suggested that if a person does not support right wing economic blundering, that person must support the economic models employed by Soviet Communists.

This kind of thinking is not exactly subtle, but it sure is amusing. Here are a few other example of this sort of argument that I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment.

The top story of yesterday, and if merits are rewarded, today, is the release of the CIA’s Family Jewels. The Family Jewels are a set of documents that the CIA gathered about its own illegal activities that took place over the course of decades. These secrets have been kept for generations, but as of yesterday, they’re available for you to look at. This is history as it was withheld from us.

Look while you can. The White House of George W. Bush has a way of reclassifying information to make it secret even after it’s been released to the public.

So, go grab those documents for yourself. The link to read them, for the time being, is right here.

To search the documents, go right up to the top of the page. To browse through them, follow the “Family Jewels” link.

Earlier today, Green Party presidential candidate