Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

At the 2011 Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Forum, right wing Christian activist Gopal Krishna attacked America for building a multicultural society (E Pluribus Unum), in which “every weird and kinky lifestyle” is given equal legal status under the law.

A weird and kinky lifestyle? Whatever could Mr. Krishna have been talking about?

How about people who claim to have a personal relationship with a two-thousand year-old zombie from across the ocean who walks on water? Would that count as a weird and kinky lifestyle?

It’s not what the groundhog predicted.

Apparently, Mike Huckabee is preparing for a 2012 presidential campaign. If that’s true, I’d love to have a Huckabee supporter come here and explain what Huckabee is doing in the following photograph.

He appears to be tying up a woman with a lasso, as if she’s a prize heifer. Is this redneck bondage?

The most telling line from Barack Obama’s speech today came when President Obama was trying to convince people that he had achieved a hard-fought compromise with Republicans when he agreed to help them push through tax cuts for billionaires.

Obama said that tax cuts for the rich were “not a hundred percent of what I want or what the Republicans want”.

So, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats got 100 percent of what they wanted in this tax cut deal? I suppose that’s true, strictly speaking.

Republicans only got 99 percent of what they wanted. Democrats got about 1 percent of what they wanted.

You can call that a compromise, sure, but not in the sense of the word “compromise” that Obama meant.

I wish that Congressman Ted Poe had stopped to consider his words more carefully before he spoke this week in an angry speech denouncing Islam. Poe said of the Cordoba House, a Muslim community center with Christian, Jewish and Muslim worship spaces and a memorial to the victims of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001:

“That piece of land in New York City took on a whole new meaning. Ground Zero is no longer just a location in New York. It is a symbol of America as powerful as the stars and stripes. It is hallowed ground of the victims who were victimized because of hate.”

A hallowed ground of hate? Is that really what Ted Poe wants to establish in New York City? Does he really mean to say that hate has the power to make ground religiously sacred?

Congressman Ted Poe is suggesting that we give terrorists the power to create religious shrines in the United States through their violent acts. I can’t think of a better way than that to encourage more terrorism in the future.

They say the eyes don’t lie. Look at the live feed of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and it sure looks like there’s just as much oil gushing out of the busted offshore drilling site as there was before BP installed its “top hat”.

New York Times reports, “At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.”

Read the rest of this important article.

It’s an amazing sight this morning from the Deepwater Horizon drill site: A robotic submersible has a circular saw attached, and a mile down under the surface, is cutting into the pipe from which a massive amount of crude oil has been gushing since the oil rig exploded and sank a month and a half ago.

BP has been repeatedly impotent in its efforts to contain the oil spill. The current effort, to cap the main spill site, isn’t even aiming to completely stop the spill. Oh, how the standards of offshore drilling have fallen. They once told us that they were technological geniuses. Now, they’re big energy goofballs.

Why, with this repeated incompetence, should we continue to allow offshore drilling?

This Sunday, a march to protest BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling oil spill will take place in Franklin County Florida. The march will start soon after 5:30 PM at the Apalachicola City Hall and will end at the Franklin County Courthouse.

Call D.T. Simmons at 323-0344 for information before the march.

A story connected to the Transocean – BP offshore drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that bears paying attention to in the weeks to come: Corruption that has enabled lax regulation and slow response to the oil spill.

Consider the telling statement overheard by a grassroots reporter in Florida, before he was kicked out of the room. Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Sole to an executive from BP: “I’m going to take care of you.”

Just how does Secretary Sole intend to take care of BP? With extra rounds of hot chocolate at oil spill emergency response meetings?

Barack Obama angered many environmentalists this week when he promised to promote the coal industry fraud of clean coal. Why would he do such a thing, when there’s never been a single viable commercial use of supposedly clean coal technology, when the technology doesn’t even really eliminate most of the pollution and waste from the process of gaining energy from coal anyway?

Well, there’s a lot of money in that coal. One of the coal giants, Alliance Resource Partners, just announced record profits for 2009. What did they do with all that money? $12,500 of it went to the Central Executive Committee of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

And what did Kentucky’s representatives in Congress do this week? They joined together to reconstitute the Congressional Coal Caucus, which includes Nick Rahall, the Democratic Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Coal dust is settling all over the Democratic Party these days.