Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

For a bit of perspective on the revelations from former NSA employee Russell Tice, which corroborate reports from a former AT&T employee about the scope of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance of the American people, let’s compare it to Watergate.

The NSA spying program makes Watergate look like small potatoes. Watergate was a politcally-motivated break-in to just one office in just one building for just a few files. The National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program, authorized retroactively through the FISA Amendments Act, on the other hand, is a break-in to every home and every office in every building in America. The NSA spying against Americans didn’t just gather a few files - it’s gathered every single file, every single telephone call, every fax, every text message, every bit of information about everywhere we go on the Internet.

The NSA seizure of our private records is not just bigger in scope than Watergate, it’s also much more free of oversight. The Democratic-led Congress in the 1970s responded to Watergate with investigations and hearings that forced Richard Nixon to resign. The Democratic-led Congress in this decade has responded to the NSA program to spy on Americans’ private lives by helping George W. Bush to cover it up, with retroactive immunity granted through the FISA Amendments Act.

Barack Obama voted for the FISA Amendments Act as a senator, and now President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder say that they want to keep the program to spy on our electronic communications without any search warrant, without real congressional oversight, and without any external controls. It’s essentially a resurrection of Total Information Awareness, and yes, Barack Obama supports it.

That’s enough to shake that Obama change loose from your pockets, isn’t it?

So why haven’t you heard more about this? Well, it’s because the story has been forgotten. Why? Well, journalists who have been targeted by the National Security Agency’s spies have become strangely silent about the program. Also, the story about Russell Tice came out last Wednesday, the day after the Obama Inauguration, when almost precisely nobody was paying attention.

This forgotten story is something you need to pay attention to, however, if you care about the future of American freedom. That’s what Chester A. Arthur says in the following video. Why Chester Arthur? Chester Arthur is America’s most forgotten President - who better to warn about the perils of our nation’s short-term memory?

Why attend an Inauguration demonstration? This pro-Constitution demonstration is a good pick, because as much as Barack Obama has inspired the trust of the American people, we know that the power brokers are waiting for him, with tools of persuasion that are difficult to resist.

Attend this demonstration on the route of the Inaugural Parade to send Obama a message: The American people want their full constitutional rights restored.

Please, President Obama - follow your Oath of Office. Uphold the Constitution.

January 20, 2009, corner of 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington D.C. - Noontime - Be there.

Want to know what’s wrong with proposition 8? Ask Simon the Political Tiger.

It’s a matter of the Constitution, see. The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to all people. That means that the law has to give everyone equal status, without discrimination. That includes same-sex couples. If heteros get to marry, then homosexual couples need to be given that same right.

No state has the right, through its legislature or through an electoral proposition, to overrule the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Prop 8 tries to do just that - and that’s what makes it an insult not just to same-sex couples, but to all Americans who believe in the freedoms and rights that the Constitution guarantees.

Oh no they didn’t!

Keep on screwin’ her, Sammy.

Yes I know she is only running for Vice President, but lets face it McCain is old and she is devious.

I have been reading as much as I can about Sarah Palin and frankly I am scared that the McCain/Palin team might actually win this election.

The main thing that scares me is the way she presents herself, even when she is hunting for a way out of the wet paperbag during interviews, she comes across as that attractive woman everyone knows from work, the library or coffee shop that seems intelligent but slightly ditzy in a cute 1950’s young wife stereotype kind of way.

That kind of woman has a serious advantage in the normal male to female and female to female dynamic in that most people don’t look past the ditz to see the danger. Others discount her ability to make choices, plans and enemies. People often believe that women like her are harmless and can be controlled. This may seem sexist, but it is just a facet of our current social environment. Like racism and homophobia, sexism dies hard, particularly when people are not even aware they are doing it.

Sarah has somehow managed to convice her supporters (most of republican party and many Hillary supporters) that her tenure as Mayor was a success and that leaving a town of 5k to 7k people with a 20 million dollar public debt, no sewers but a great sports complex makes her fiscally conservative and trustworthy steward of public interest. Forget the fact that Wasilla, AK had no debt when she took office, their annual budget was about $3 million dollars less when she got there than when she left and that she had implemented a personal jihad against those that stood up to her.

They seem to willingly overlook the fact she has admitted, proudly I might add, that she demanded the written resignations of all the top officials when she took office “as a demonstration to my administration”. Since when to public officials in the United States take an oath of fealty to the incumbent?

There has been some controversy over whether she wanted to ban books from the Wasilla public library. Sarah claims that she was only having a “rhetorical discussion” with the head librarian and she would never support banning books. This is an amazingly strange “rhetorical discussion” to have with anyone, much less a librarian, particularly one from whom you have demanded a letter of resignation to show loyalty to your administration. It is also peculiar timing that this “rhetorical discussion” occurred during a time when the church she attends regularly was in the midst of a petition drive to ban books in the public library, the school and in local book shops. The church apparently is not willing, yet, to claim their petition was only a rhetorical one.

I could repeat all the rumours and conspiracy theories here, but I will leave that for others to do. I just want people to think clearly about this woman and her abilities to misdirect attention.

Another great example is the GOP machine and Sarah backers who keep claiming she is enormously popular in Alaska. Funny thing is most interviews I have found with “regular citizens” pretty much declaim her as one step above a feudal lordling with an axe to grind. Not what I would deem popular by even the broadest standard.

So please do us all a favor, read up on her, seperate the wheat from the chaff, then go out a buy a snake to handle while you pray that the witch known as Sarah Palin flies away on her broom.

The Associated Press headline this morning was

Bush: China must end detentions, ensure freedoms

Couldn’t it have been

China: Bush must end detentions, ensure freedoms

?

At best, I was a half-hearted supporter of Obama’s. I was never overly enthused by him, though there were some periods where I thought I’d be able to call myself an Obama supporter with a measure of dignity. Over the last few weeks, that illusion has been shattered.

For all his talk and all his charm, Obama’s showing me now what I can expect in the future; more of the same old G.W.B. bullshit. As I look on his stances on the FISA amendments and now the faith-based bullshit, I can’t help but be left to reflect on our current situation.

Over the last 8 years, two presidential terms, George Bush has pulled some of the most unlawful actions in American history with impunity. Anything he wanted, he got on a golden platter. Anything illegal he did was turned a blind eye to by those sworn to uphold the rule of the law. I am now convinced that this attitude has forever ruined American politics and will lead us into a new age where corruption runs unchecked.

Obama now knows he’s got a 50-50 chance of getting the presidency and that Americans are pretty pissed at Republicans so the pressure’s pretty well off him now. And he’s been shown that the president can snub his nose at the law and Congress will roll over like the impotent, toothless tiger that it’s become.

And really, what choice do we, the people, have but to grin and bear it? There’s nothing that I know of which can force a reform to the corrupt politicains we now have in office. There’s no third party I can vote for because rarely, if ever, does a third party get on the ballet here in Oklahoma. Any time a third party gets media attention, it seems, it is laughed down until it crawls back under it’s rock.

The only thing I can think of, which I’ve mentioned before, is revoke the guarenteed spots on the ballots for Republicans and Democrats, but I know that won’t happen with the government the way it is now. I honestly want to know what can be done to change the way things are. I know, call my senator and voice my opinion, but even then the shit that shouldn’t be passed through congress is still being passed.

I thought I was going to vote this year, but I’m now seeing myself with the same options as when I thought Hillary Clinton was going to get the nomination; a choice between a Republican and a Republican Lite. Which one will shit on the Constitution less?

Obama, I thought you were the voice of change, I thought you were a voice of hope, but now I see what’s under the sheep’s clothing and I’m not impressed.

Will America ever return to the way it was before Bush got into office?

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.

I just quit MoveOn. It isn’t because I disagree with their politics. It’s because they have compromised their politics.

Just yesterday, I got an email from MoveOn expressing their opposition to H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act. That’s the right stand, because the FISA Amendments Act is a terribly abusive law that violates the Constitution and breaks trust with the American people. It allows massive, unrestrained spying programs by the government against American citizens, without any search warrant or any form of probable cause required.

The people who voted for the FISA Amendments Act won’t tell you this. They’ll tell you that the powers granted under the bill are just fine, and there’s nothing to worry about. But, have you actually read the legislation? Don’t believe what they tell you until you’ve read the bill yourself.

It’s bad enough that 105 Democrats in Congress turned coat and joined forces with George W. Bush to pass the FISA Amendments Act. What’s worse is that Barack Obama has announced he will join them. Barack Obama is betraying the supporters who helped him win the Democratic nomination.

What about MoveOn? They’re pretending nothing has happened. They’re moving ahead with fundraisers for Barack Obama.

That’s not the kind of politics that MoveOn is supposed to stand for. That’s why, until they repudiate Barack Obama or convince Barack Obama to change his position, I have quit MoveOn.

I encourage you to do the same. Here’s the short message I sent to Moveon explaining why I’ve quit.

“Barack Obama just endorsed the FISA Amendments Act. MoveOn says it’s against that law, as it should. It’s a betrayal of the Constitution and an abuse of our trust. Barack Obama should lose the endorsement of MoveOn because of this betrayal. When MoveOn repudiates Barack Obama, I will rejoin MoveOn. Until then, I will not be with you - and no bake sales for Obama.”

In the aftermath of the long-delayed Supreme Court decision to reassert the right of all people held prisoner by the United States government to have the ancient protection of habeas corpus, there has been a lot of hand-wringing among right wing pundits about whether the USA is strong enough to handle this level of freedom. Can we deal with a society where people are not thrown into prison at the whim of political elites, they ask, with anxious wrinkles crossing their foreheads.

The short answer is: Of course we can handle it, if we, the citizens of the USA, can avoid the temptation to buck and run. The structures of American democracy are not so limp and wimpy as right wingers seem to think.

Beyond that short answer, it’s important to understand what these right wing pundits are really concerned about. They purport to be worried about the nature of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other secret torture prisons run by George W. Bush. More honestly, these right wingers are concerned by the very idea of justice, applied equally and fairly. They worry their meek little hearts about whether a fair system of justice will protect them from the people they fear.

They ask, Should the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay be allowed to have access to lawyers? However, their question really amounts to this: Should we restrict prisoners’ access to lawyers, period?

The essence of the law under the United States Constitution, which applies everywhere that the United States government has authority, is that all people, no matter what they are accused of, should have equal protection under the law. That means that if we restrict some prisoners’ access to lawyers, we are declaring that our system has the right to restrict access to lawyers for any class of prisoners, if they should happen to offend us. If we make that choice, we are choosing to upend the Constitution, and to make our legal system unbalanced and unjust.

For that reason, no, the prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay should not have their access to lawyers restricted. If we believe that justice works, we have no reason to be afraid. If we are afraid that justice does not work when applied without prejudice, we need to learn to control our fears. This is no time for right wing sissies to come along with their hands shaking, muttering that America can’t be safe unless we throw away our Constitution and the system of justice that it has established.

Get some backbone. Support justice, especially for the people you think are guilty of terrible things. If they really are guilty, a fair system of justice will find them guilty.

Northeastern University has revealed that a team of its researchers used people’s cell phones to track their movements without their knowledge and without their permission. 100,000 people were spied upon by the Northeastern University team. That’s illegal for academic researchers to do in the United States, so Northeastern University chose to spy on people outside of the USA, in some foreign country that they refuse to name.

The Associated Press is reporting the story, but only part of the story. “That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission,” the AP writes.

What the AP quotes Rob Kenny as saying is not exactly true. Academics, and other private citizens like you and I cannot legally use cell phone networks to spy on people’s private movements and communications, but the government can.

Thanks to the Patriot Act and the Protect America Act, the American federal government has the power to do the same thing here in the United States that the researchers from Northeastern University did outside of the USA.

The White House can take the information your cell phone beams back to its network, and use that to see where you go and what you do, not just who you talk to with your cell phone. They don’t need a search warrant to do it. They don’t need your permission. They don’t even need to tell you they’re spying on you. No judge approves the spying. No one can stop it.

This kind of spying is a tool of political power.

With this power, the President can track political activists.

The President can eavesdrop on congressional aides.

George W. Bush has the power to spy on Barack Obama’s campaign.

The tricky part is that you can never be sure that you’re being spied on when you’re carrying your cell phone… and you can never be sure that you aren’t being spied on either.

Never being sure if someone from the government is watching where you go, or listening to what you say, you can never be sure that you’re alone.

That kind of environment stifles free speech, free association, and even free thinking.

Here’s a clue to understanding the language of Homeland Security: If you want to discover the torture devices they’re developing for use against prisoners, search for the phrase, “nonlethal weapon”.

Case in point: The LED Incapacitator.

The LED Incapacitator is a special kind of flashlight that is designed to emit light in certain patterns and wavelengths in such a way as to force people to vomit.

The blog Mind Modulations says of the LED Incapacitator that it could be used to bring “a bad guy” into custody.

Substitute “criminal suspect” for “bad guy”. This LED Incapacitator may be nonlethal, but it is a form of physical and psychological attack.

The same blog relays the idea that a larger could be used against “a mob”.

Substitute “group of protesters” for “mob”, and you see another way in which this kind of attack technology can go terribly wrong.

We know that our government follows the Joseph Lieberman school of torture: That so long as you don’t leave a permanent mark, you can inflict whatever kind of suffering you want to against prisoners and criminal suspects.

The LED Incapacitator is one more instrument of torture that can be used by the Homeland Security goons against us.

Do you doubt how serious a threat to American freedom it is that Congress is about to pass the FISA Amendments Act, unamended, and allow the President of the United States to spy against Americans’ emails, telephone calls and Internet use without any requirement to justify the spying, and without any congressional oversight? Don’t just listen to the warnings of us liberals over here at Irregular Times. Listen to the financial conservatives over on Wall Street.

Here’s what Rex Nutting, the Washington Bureau Chief of Marketwatch, has to say about the consequences of the passage of this law:

“If Al Qaeda is fighting us because they hate our freedoms, as President Bush often says, then they’re winning the war.

Pretty soon, we won’t have any more freedoms for them to hate.

Scratch the Fourth Amendment off the list of freedoms that we thought we had.”

Marketwatch is not some progressive publication like The Nation. It’s “a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company”.

When Wall Street fiscal conservatives ring the bell of alarm about the imminent loss of American freedom, it’s time for even optimistic skeptics to listen, and move to action.

The Senate is due to vote on the FISA Amendments Act any time now. Get out of your chair and tell your senators to vote NO.

The number of the congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

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.”

Many in the corporate world are having a knee jerk reaction to support the Republican proposal to, through the extension of the Protect America Act in the FISA Amendments Act, give telecommunications companies legal immunity from the assistance they have given to the government in conducting massive electronic spying operations against American citizens while those operations were against the law. Their automatic impulse is to support the Republican Party. In this case, however, to do so is directly in contradiction to their economic interests.

Corporations do have a responsibility to the government - to follow the law. Corporations also have responsibilities to their customers, to honor their privacy agreements. If corporations show that their legal agreements with customers no longer have any weight, what basis is there for trust in the marketplace any longer?

It is absolutely to claim that America can only be secure from terrorism when the government is allowed to conduct massive electronic spying operations against American citizens AND businesses without any judicial review or congressional oversight. In fact, America cannot be secure from terrorism when power over communications is so centralized that free and open communication within and between corporations and citizens is limited by self-censorship. A nation of citizens afraid to talk to each other openly is a nation where no one, including the government can know what is going on.

The FISA Amendments Act legislation goes far beyond reasonable reform. It is a threat to the independence of business from government and to the liberty of the individual citizen.

No one can conduct business when they aren’t assured of private communications. If people in business believe that government spies may be eavesdropping upon any of their electronic conversations, innovation, cooperation and sales will grind down until they are excruciatingly slow. Without the ability to secure proprietary information, all the competitive advantages built up over the last 15 years through the development of electronic communication would come to naught.

The FISA Amendments Act would indeed give legal immunity to corporations like AT&T, Google and Yahoo, for cooperating with the federal government in spying against Americans’ private communications. However, that legal immunity is no protection. In fact, such immunity would strip corporations of any legal justification for refusing to cooperate with government electronic spying programs.

If the FISA Amendments Act, no company could guarantee its customers privacy. That would have a chilling effect on all business, not just individual communication.

The American economy cannot function without freedom of speech, the right to free assembly, and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure. That’s why American business ought to come together with civil libertarians and demand that the FISA Amendments Act be voted down by the United States Senate.

En lieu of the recent posts on the main blog about the FISA ordeal, I thought I should share this little story I came across when I logged on to Yahoor today.

(Link)

Senate delays eavesdropping vote
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 39 minutes ago

The Senate on Thursday signaled support for granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government conduct warrantless eavesdropping, a sign that the contentious provision may be headed for approval next week.

On a strong 60-36 vote, senators rejected an amendment that would have killed the immunity provision and strengthened the powers of a secret court to oversee the surveillance of phone calls and e-mails that involve people inside the United States.

Further action on the legislation was delayed until Monday, pushing Congress closer to a Feb. 1 deadline for enacting a new law. If a new law is not signed by the president by then, some eavesdropping practices that are now legal would be prohibited.

The Bush administration is insisting that any new law also protect from potentially crippling civil lawsuits those telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, R-Nev., blamed Republicans for the delay, saying they were trying to block a series of amendments majority Democrats sought to offer.

“It appears the president and Republicans want failure. They don’t want a bill,” Reid said.

The draft bill, written by the Senate Intelligence Committee, would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law, first enacted in 1978, dictates when federal agents must obtain court permission before tapping phone and computer lines inside the United States to gather intelligence on foreign threats. Agents may tap lines outside the country without court oversight.

It was the second time in six weeks the Senate had taken up the FISA modernization bill, only to see action stymied. Reid abruptly closed down debate in December when it became clear the Senate couldn’t finish work before the holiday break.

Most vexing to the intelligence agencies, without an extension of the law the government would return to needing individual court orders to listen in on any communication that passes through U.S. telecommunications switches and computer servers — even those that are between people who are outside the country. This is not required by FISA, according to legal experts, but became the practice over time to provide firms with legal protections.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on Thursday proposed extending the existing law for 30 days to buy the Senate additional time to produce a bill. The House completed its version of the bill last fall.

In a move to resolve the immunity issue, the key impasse on the legislation, the White House ended months of resistance Thursday and agreed to give House members access to secret documents about its warrantless wiretapping program.

The Bush administration is trying to persuade the House to agree to retroactively shield from liability those companies that helped the government eavesdrop on Americans without the approval of the FISA court. About 40 such civil lawsuits are pending against telecommunications firms, and the administration says if the cases go forward they could reveal information that would compromise national security. It also contends that the companies could be bankrupted if the lawsuits are successful.

The companies were helping the administration carry out the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, a still-classified effort that intercepted communications on U.S. soil without oversight from the FISA court from Sept. 11, 2001, to Jan. 17, 2007.

Reyes and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence panel, requested access to the White House documents in May. House Democrats say they will not support telecom immunity without seeing them first. Some senators were given access to the documents last fall.

The documents include the president’s authorization of warrantless wiretapping, Justice Department legal opinions going back to 2001, and the requests sent to the telecommunications companies asking for their assistance.

I’m trying really hard to be surprised these days…really hard…

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?

Right wingers like to talk about traditions, assuming that what has been traditional must support what they want to do. Sadly, they have forgotten the American tradition of preserving liberty in spite of all threats. After our nation was attacked for one morning of one day, the right wing couldn’t move fast enough to wreck America’s freedoms in the name of security, starting with the Patriot Act and moving quickly on from there until the Bill of Rights was full of holes wide enough for any tyrant to glide through with ease.

One of America’s true patriots, Sam Adams, had harsh words for that kind of cowardice: “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards.”

Sam Adams didn’t say that the liberties of our country, based on our Constitution, are worth defending unless we get scared, or unless a hazard seems particularly troublesome. He said that the liberties of our country are worth defending against all hazards.

What part of all hazards does the right wing not understand? It’s progressives who truly honor the American tradition of liberty. Right wingers disrespect the tradition with their trembling Homeland Security.

A follow-up to the story of the Saudi government punishing a rape victem located here.

News Article

Saudis defend punishment for rape victim
Wed Nov 21, 9:19 AM ET

The Saudi judiciary on Tuesday defended a court verdict that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a gang rape to six months in jail and 200 lashes because she was with an unrelated male when they were attacked.

The Shiite Muslim woman had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating Saudi Arabia’s rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes.

But in considering her appeal of the verdict, the Saudi General Court increased the punishment. It also roughly doubled prison sentences for the seven men convicted of raping the woman, Saudi news media said last week.

The reports triggered an international outcry over the Saudis punishing the victim of a terrible crime.

But the Ministry of Justice stood by the verdict Tuesday, saying that “charges were proven” against the woman for having been in a car with a man who was not her relative.

The ministry implied the victim’s sentence was increased because she spoke out to the press. “For whoever has an objection on verdicts issued, the system allows an appeal without resorting to the media,” said the statement, which was carried on the official Saudi Press Agency.

The attack occurred in 2006. The victim says she was in a car with a male student she used to know trying to retrieve a picture of her. She says two men got into the car and drove them to a secluded area where she was raped by seven men. Her friend also was assaulted.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Judges have wide discretion in punishing criminals, rules of evidence are vague and sometimes no defense lawyer is present. The result, critics say, are sentences left to the whim of judges. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light sentence to death.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack avoided directly criticizing the Saudi judiciary over the case, but said the verdict “causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment.”

“It is within the power of the Saudi government to take a look at the verdict and change it,” McCormack said.

Canada’s minister for women’s issues, Jose Verger, has called the sentence “barbaric.”

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the verdict “not only sends victims of sexual violence the message that they should not press charges, but in effect offers protection and impunity to the perpetrators.”

I’m sorry, but you can try to make any excuse you want to explain away this type of behavior but I can’t view this sort of thing as anything less than the most outrageous, disgusting, immoral perversion of justice that I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

Every so often I’ll see something that can fill me with such disgust and outrage it becomes difficult to express my feelings. This is one of those times.

And to anyone who claims that the members and writers of Irregular Times give Islam a free ride while harping on Christianity, I’m about to prove you wong.

Female rape victim gets 200 lashes and jail
From correspondents in Riyadh
November 16, 2007 07:15am

A COURT in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail.
The 19-year-old woman - whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms - was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

Saudi Arabia enforces a strict Islamic doctrine known as Wahhabism and forbids unrelated men and women from associating with each other, bans women from driving and forces them to cover head-to-toe in public.

Last year, the court sentenced six Saudi men to between one and five years in jail for the rape as well as ordering lashes for the victim, a member of the minority Shi’ite community.

But the woman’s lawyer Abdul Rahman al-Lahem appealed, arguing that the punishments were too lenient in a country where the offence can carry the death penalty.

In the new verdict issued on Wednesday, the Al-Qatif court also toughened the sentences against the six men to between two and nine years in prison.

The case has angered members of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite community. The convicted men are Sunni Muslims, the dominant community in the oil-rich Gulf state.

Mr Lahem, also a human rights activist, said yesterday the court had banned him from handling the rape case and withdrew his licence to practise law because he challenged the verdict.

He said he has also been summoned by the ministry of justice to appear before a disciplinary committee in December.

Mr Lahem said the move might be due to his criticism of some judicial institutions, and “contradicts King Abdullah’s quest to introduce reform, especially in the justice system.”

King Abdullah last month approved a new body of laws regulating the judicial system in Saudi Arabia, which rules on the basis of sharia, or Islamic law.

This is the kind of people who the USA supports. We’re allies with Saudi Arabia even though the majority of the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 were from there and we’re even sending them military equipment.

When I first read this, I admit, I found I could easily renounce an anti-violence ideal if it meant I could deal some Old Testament type punishment on the people involved with this story, but right now it’s making me feel sick to my stomach.

Religion of peace my achin’ ass.

Through the Military Commissions Act, right wing Democrats and Republicans in Congress have helped George W. Bush revoke the writ of habeas corpus, which requires governments to provide specific information about the reason that prisoners are being held. Habeas corpus is an essential tool in the prevention of arbitrary imprisonment.

What would America’s founding fathers think of the Military Commission Act’s removal of this protection? Alexander Hamilton certainly wouldn’t have approved of it. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton wrote that “arbitrary imprisonments have been in all ages the favourite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”

Hint to Young Republicans: Tyranny is a bad thing.

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.

I could have a big, long wish list for the Democrats in Congress, and fill up a screen here with it, no problem. However, if I had to prioritize my concerns about the inaction of Congress, I could quickly list them as follows:

1. I want my freedom back
2. I want the environmental crisis to be confronted with without further delay
3. I want an end to war

It’s with that focus that I created this video, All I Want From Congress is My Freedom Back. It’s part of my ongoing experimentation with Anime Studio 5, as I slowly work out the glitches of the software, and explore what it’s able and not able to do.

Discovery with this project: With a distorted voice, the lip synching feature doesn’t work well at all. You’ll see that clearly, if you watch the video. I screened out the music for purposes of lip synching, so I know that’s not the problem.

Here is the full text of George W. Bush’s Executive Order of September 12, 2007:

“Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines flight 93, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, last extended on September 5, 2006, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2007. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

GEORGE W. BUSH ”

Nearly all of George W. Bush’s presidency has been a national emergency. There’s really nothing else to say, is there?

Every time I think of AT&T, I think of that jingle they had back in the 1980s: “It’s the right choice - AT&T!” After today, however, I’m putting new words to that music.

“The Big Brother Choice - AT&T”

This statement comes from an attorney for AT&T, testifying in the US 9th Circuit Court, which was hearing lawsuits by people who have evidence that the government and AT&T have been collaborating to establish a massive electronic surveillance program to spy against peaceful, law-abiding Americans: “The government has said that whatever AT&T is doing with the government is a state secret. As a consequence, no evidence can come in whether the individuals’ communications were ever intercepted or whether we played any role in it.”

Oh, how convenient that AT&T does not have to officially acknowledge its involvement in the electronic spy program. Of course, if there were no such program, AT&T’s attorney could simply say so, right? That wouldn’t be a state secret.

AT&T has, for all intents and purposes, admitted that there is a massive program to spy on Americans as they use the Internet and make telephone calls, and that AT&T is helping the government to make the spy program work. Only, AT&T thumbed its nose at the judge and said that the judge didn’t have the right to know about it, and the American people didn’t have a right to know about the AT&T program to spy on Americans either.

So, AT&T is helping the government spy against their customers - even when those customers haven’t broken any law. That’s not just low down. That’s bad for business, AT&T.

Thanks to John Stracke for bringing to my attention today’s news that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has gained new powers to rush through death penalty cases to quick execution even when the quality of justice is sacrificed in the practice.

It’s a bald-faced grab for power. Executing terrorists fast has no benefit to domestic security (or Homeland Security, as the new politics of fear tells me I’m supposed to say). In fact, quickly executing people who may be able to give valuable information hurts security, as the too-quick execution of Timothy McVeigh showed. Too many secrets about the people behind the Oklahoma City bombings died with McVeigh.

The new death penalty powers come right on the heels of Alberto Gonzales getting powers to force Americans to participate in huge electronic spying programs against their fellow citizens, in what looks more and more like the old Total Information Awareness project.

Those who have read the new law that gives those powers, the Protect America Act, know that there is only one other person in the federal government who shares the power with Alberto Gonzales to run its Internet and telephone spying programs: The Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell.

Michael McConnell also was caught in a grab for power today. It seems that Director McConnell has pushed through yet another dramatic new program to spy against Americans. Domestic law enforcement agencies now have the power to use military spy satellites that were designed to spy against the Soviet Union to peer down at the United States, and see what people are are doing here - no terrorist threat required for the spying.

This is a dramatic consolidation of power in the hands of just two men in the federal government - Gonzales and McConnell. Why the power grab now? What do they plan to do with that power that they weren’t doing before?

I’m speaking to the small segment of Americans who is paying attention and cares about preserving the liberty that is the foundation of American government. Something very big is going on, right before your eyes.

Keep an eye to the skies… and wave hello to McConnell and Gonzales.

(To the tune of My Bonnie — Sing it!)

My Ron Paul is gaga for freedom
My Ron Paul loves liberty
My Ron Paul makes socialists jealous
O Vote Ron Paul’s Presidency!

Vote Ron
Vote Paul
O Vote Ron Paul’s Presidency, you see!
Vote Ron
vote Paul
O Vote Ron Paul’s Presidency

My Ron Paul hates deficit spending
My Ron Paul likes austerity
My Ron Paul won’t raise all your taxes
O Vote Ron Paul’s Presidency!

Vote Ron
Vote Paul
O Vote Ron Paul’s Presidency, you see!
Vote Ron
vote Paul
O Vote Ron Paul’s Presidency

As I have been reading many of the articles here at Irregular Times about the Protect America Act and the associated programs at the NSA to spy on our activity on the Internet, I have been asking myself one question over and over: How can we live under this constant surveillance by our government?

Our email is being read. Our telephone calls are being listened to. Where we go and what we do on the Internet is being recorded.

How can we do anything when we know that our words and actions are all being recorded, to be used against us at some future date by our own government?

I didn’t come up a good answer to that question, until I realized it was the wrong question. Here’s the right question for us to ask ourselves in these times: How, when the government is constantly watching and recording us using the Internet, should we respond?

The idea that we would respond to government spying against us on the Internet by withdrawing, pulling back into our private lives, in our own homes, huddled away from the telephone and the computer for fear of the prying eyes and long ears of Alberto Gonzales, is exactly the kind of reaction the right wingers would love. They would love for us to withdraw from political activism. They would love for us to be afraid.

So, I think that the best response to the Protect America Act is to go on doing things just as we have in the past. We keep on speaking up. We keep on living, and expanding our lives online. We refuse to be afraid.

The Internet levels the playing field. It’s no wonder that people like George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales want to abuse it, and tarnish it with the stain of constant suspicion.

Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Keep on.

Help save Salvia in Illinois, Time is running out fast!!! Email our Governor or better yet fax, if you have a fax machine 

If Fax:  Address Fax to Governor Rod Blagojevich, subject line: Citizens request that you line item veto:  HB0457: page 7 LRB095 04451 RLC 26428 b and remove Salvia from the bill.  Governor at the following fax numbers:  217-524-6262 or 312-814-4862

This is what to fax or email the Governor: (COPY AND PASTE THE BELOW)

Governor Rod Blagojevich:  Citizens request that you line item veto:  HB0457: page 7 LRB095 04451 RLC 26428 b  and remove Salvia from the bill.  

Citizens request that you line item veto:  HB0457: page 7 LRB095 04451 RLC 26428 b and remove Salvia from the bill.  Salvia is not a plant that should be considered for this bill.  If you make this plant illegal not only will you be eliminating 100,000 of dollars a year in tax revenue to the state of Illinois, you will be shutting down businesses and putting people out of work.  Salvia is currently used in shaman rituals, religious ceremonies and for healing both by lisc. and holistic doctors and practitioners.  The plant has antioxidants, is a natural anti- depressant, is being used and researched to treat bipolar disorder,alzheimer’s (because it unlocks memory and helps recall), is being used to benefit suffers of rheumatism and joint pain, to aid others overcome severe drug additions and treat severe depression (documented in medical studies has been successful where other medications have failed), it has also be used to ease depression related to PMS and new cutting edge research of biosynthesis and medical applications of rosmarinic acid has been held promising. Hundred’s of thousands who could be helped by the benefits of Salvia will be left to suffer.  Medical research is very hopeful about how it can assist in a greater understanding of the brain. The state would also be rejecting alternative religions, cultures and societies that hold this plant SACRED, yes SACRED (American Indians, Shaman faiths, Alternative faiths and societies and peoples who immigrated from South and Central America into the US, use it to Salvia to commune with the Holy Mother and the Divine (God) and many of these people are in the US and Illinois.  It would cost Illinois taxpayers millions to police salvia.  People would illegally grow it, sell it, without the tax benefits going to our schools, roads, hospitals, cities and townships. Press accounts of efforts to ban Salvia often quote law enforcement and government officials who exhibit an inaccurate knowledge of the plant’s effects. Salvia has a nondescript appearance (being in the same genus as cooking sage), can be grown in a small space, has no odor and requires no elaborate lighting set-up. For these reasons, criminalization is likely to affect only the commercial sale of the plant, and not its private cultivation, which would be very difficult to police and extremely costly to tax payers.  

Citizens request that you line item veto:  HB0457: page 7 LRB095 04451 RLC 26428 b  and remove Salvia from the bill.  Salvia divinorum has begun to be researched and documented by a number of companies and universities on the medicinal applications of Salvia.  Including antioxidants, as a natural anti- depressant, use against rheumatism and joint pain, to aid others overcome additions and treat severe depression where other medications have failed (these cases have already been medically documented), to ease depression related to PMS and new cutting edge research of biosynthesis and medical applications of rosmarinic acid.  But if salvia is made illegal, it will greatly reduce the amount of research needed and treatment protocols that may result in ending the suffering of 1000’s of individuals.  Salvia is in no way a stimulant, a sedative, a narcotic, nor a tranquilizer.  Medical research has great hope for this plant. Be cautious about outlawing plants when you have yet to uncover its medicinal value.  For example, we have just found out in newly released medical research of another plant that has been crucified as a drug in the US for decades and is currently illegal in most states, yet NOW been proven by medical research that it slows and even stops the growth of tumors and may be especially beneficial to breast cancer research.  Thousands of women die each year from Breast Cancer and could have been saved had people who did their research, stopped and considered the long-term affects on medicine and society and got informed.  Thousands more could benefit from the treatments using Salvia.  Salvia has never caused anyone harm and does not have 1/10 the negative side affects of cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol or many, many prescription drugs (we know why no one bans them, money and lobbyist).  Thousands upon thousands die from addictions to tabacco and alcohol every year–yet not one tries to band these because it is big business.  Lastly, under the Federal Analogue Act, salvia fails to meet the “chemically similar” criteria and thus is not subject to the analogue act provisions.

SALVIA DIVINORUM should be available for all those over the age of 18. STOP THE WITCH HUNT AND BE THE GOVERNOR OF REASON AND LEAD THE WAY! 

Please also email the ACLU acluofillinois@aclu-il.org, please pass on to friends

It seems the Palestinian people want nothing more than statehood.

At the recent Arab economic summit at the Dead Sea, that’s all King Abdullah talked about–statehood for Palestine. The prime minister of Jordan met yesterday with U.S. congressional aides to discuss Palestinian statehood. The Jordan Times has taken to mentioning the subject somewhere in every edition. And this week’s Zogby column is on the subject of Palestinian statehood.

Why then is Palestine not a country already? What is preventing their leadership from declaring independence? It seems that the Palestinian people are being ill-served by their leaders if they truly want independence and their leaders aren’t giving it to them. Why do they continue to cry about it on the world stage but do nothing?

Reminds me of the much-quoted statement of Jordan’s first king, Abdullah I, who in 1937 wrote in a letter to the president of the Young Men’s Muslim Association in Egypt:

O Brother in Islam, the pillars of Zionism in Palestine are three: the Balfour promise; the European nations that have decided to expel the Jews from their lands and direct them to Palestine; and the extremists among the Arabs who do not accept any solution, but simply weep and howl, calling for help from those who cannot do them any good. So behold Palestine, breathing its last!

So is that it? Some sort of national trait that makes the Palestinians eternal complainers who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity? It seems that with the Hamas takeover of Gaza and the expulsion of Hamas extremists from the West Bank government, one of Abdullah’s pillars obstructing Palestine–the extremist element–has been dealt with. Surely this is another opportunity, if only Palestine’s leadership would wake up in time.

Every successful liberation movement in the world knows this fact: No one gives you your rights; you have to take them.

So what are the excuses being bandied about for not declaring Palestinian independence right now?

It has been said that Palestine could not win a war of independence against Israel. But Palestine has attacked Israel multiple times, fighting several wars and two intifadas without any well-defined objective. They are willing to fight for nothing, but not for independence?

It has been said that there are still Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas. So what? There are Palestinians in Israel, some of them even in the Knesset. Palestinians don’t like the Jewish settlers, but neither do the Israelis. The settlers are difficult. Nobody likes them.

And the Jewish Israelis find the Israeli Palestinians difficult, cooperating in private but unleashing barrages of bombastic rhetoric in public. Still Israel attempts to guarantee the rights of the Palestinian Israelis and tries to protect them. Surely the Palestinians can accept a few settlers as citizens, if the settlers would be willing to stay on those terms…

It has been said that Palestinians do not want a two state solution. That’s not what the latest Zogby International poll says, but supposing it was true? How would Palestine declaring independence have any effect whatsoever on the question of statehood for Israel? Preventing Palestine from becoming a nation does not prevent Israel from becoming a nation. It only prevents Palestine from becoming a nation.

With independence secured, Palestine could then go about its other international priority: the right of return. Many say the “right of return” is just a red herring to try to get some compensation from the international community for those who have been displaced. But I say you can have real return. controlled by the Palestinian government. They can set up a department to do nothing but study return. Not everybody all at once, of course. They could start with the businessmen who have been successful somewhere else . The Palestinians have been called the “Jews of the Arab world” for their skill with business. Just as the Jews were once the only religious group that could trade because of Christian prohibitions on charging interest, business leaders from the Palestinian diaspora have become adept at what they do. Surely some of their skills could be harnessed to build a new Palestine.

Palestine has wasted too much time and energy throwing useless stones at Israel instead of tending their own garden. Palestinian leadership needs to get a vision of what they can be. They need to communicate that vision to their people and to the world. And then they need to get off their butts and make a country.

I get so frustrated with these Palestinians. Hey, Palestine: JUST DO IT.

I caught this on Yahoo news a couple minutes ago and once again I find myself angry and indignant with our appointed leader. I would say that it’s hard to believe, but then again unless it’s something to help save lives or improve quality of life he’ll rubber stamp it. Get troops out of Iraq? Research to save lives? Can’t have that now, can we?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070620/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_stem_cells

Bush to Veto Stem Cell Bill

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer 13 minutes ago

Pushing back against the Democratic-led Congress, President Bush intends to veto a bill Wednesday that would have eased restraints on federally funded embryonic stem cell research — work that supporters say holds promise for fighting disease.

At the same time, Bush will issue an executive order directing the Health and Human Services Department to promote research into cells that, like human embryonic stem cells, also hold the potential of regenerating into different types of cells that could help treat illness.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Tuesday that Bush would outline an initiative that could make federal funding available for research on additional “pluripotent” stem cells — ones that can give rise to any kind of cell in the body except those required to develop a fetus.

The president has accused majority Democrats of recycling an old measure that he already vetoed and argued that the bill would mean American taxpayers would — for the first time — be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

“The president supports and encourages stem cell research — including using embryonic lines — as long as it does not involve creating, harming or destroying embryos,” Fratto said. “That is an ethical line that should not be crossed.”

Democrats made the legislation a top priority when they took control of the House and Senate in January, but they don’t have enough votes to override Bush’s decision.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appealed to Bush on Tuesday not to veto the bill. He said the measure acknowledges the ethical issues at stake and offers even stronger research guidelines than exist under the president’s current policy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used Bush’s veto threat as a reason to send out an e-mail letter soliciting contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to help elect more Democrats.

“By vetoing a bill that expands stem cell research, the president will say `no’ to the more than 70 percent of Americans who support it, `no’ to our Democratic Congress’ fight for progress, and `no’ to saving lives and to potential cures for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s,” Pelosi wrote. “He will say `no’ to hope.”

In light of the veto, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who planned to be at the White House event, sought support for a stem cell bill he is sponsoring. It has passed the Senate but has not yet been taken up by the House.

“My stem cell bill, which passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support, offers a clear alternative for our colleagues in the House to significantly expand federally funded stem cell research, while ensuring no taxpayer dollars are used for the destruction of human embryos,” Coleman said.

Coleman urged Democrats who favored the bill Bush was to veto to get behind his legislation.

“Those who support the stem cell research bill … are at a definitive crossroads,” he said. “Do they seek to advance lifesaving research for millions of Americans suffering from serious disease or do they, in fact, prefer to keep stem cell research at a political stalemate? ”

This will be the third veto of Bush’s presidency. His first occurred last year when he rejected legislation to allow funding of additional lines of embryonic stem cells — a measure that passed over the objections of Republicans then in control. Earlier this year, he vetoed legislation that would have set timetables for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Opponents of the latest stem cell measure insisted that the use of embryonic stem cells was the wrong approach on moral grounds — and possibly not even the most promising one scientifically. They cite breakthroughs involving medical research conducted with adult stem cells, umbilical cord blood and amniotic fluid, none of which involve the destruction of a human embryo.

The science aside, the issue has weighty political implications.

Public opinion polls show strong support for the research, and it could return as an issue in the 2008 elections.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared in Hanover, N.H., this week with a child who has diabetes and a paralyzed 23-year-old to urge Bush not to veto the bill. Last month, the issue was a topic at a debate with Republican presidential hopefuls in California.

The bill Bush is vetoing passed Congress on June 7, drawing the support of 210 House Democrats and 37 Republicans. That was 35 votes fewer than needed to override a veto. The Senate cleared the bill earlier by a margin that was one vote shy of the two-thirds needed to overcome Bush’s objections.

According to the National Institutes of Health Web site, scientists were first able to conduct research with embryonic stem cells in 1998. There were no federal funds for the work until Bush announced on Aug. 9, 2001, that his administration would make the funds available for lines of cells that already were in existence.

Defenders of religion as a positive force for humanity need to consider the stoning death of a teenage girl who was stoned to death in the supposedly “liberated” Iraqi Kurdistan. Amnesty International reports that she was struck by relatives with stones until dead as punishment for staying out the night with a Muslim boyfriend.

Girl was not Muslim, exactly, but from a Yezidi family. The Yezidi have a system of religious belief that is influenced by Islam, but is not strictly Islamic.

Want to find out more about this religion? Go ahead and Google “Yezidi”. You’ll find some information about the Yezidi religious practice in the abstract, but two of the ten links on the first page of the search results are about the stoning.

Certainly, for myself, the story of the Yezidi stoning dominates my thinking about this cultural group. I’m curious about their beliefs and practices, but first and foremost, the though comes into my mind that, gosh, the Yezidi may be interesting and unique, but they stone teenage girls to death.

That’s a big lesson for cultures, as they seek to present themselves in the world. All the highfalutin ideas about the creation of the Universe and the meaning of life are great, but when you engage in barbaric practices, that’s all that will matter to most people.

Bear with me please …

For 6 years now, I have been checking irregulartimes to find out what the word from across the pond was. Yeh … I’m English. I’m drunk too … like I said, bear with me So, I’m wondering how many people who visit this site are feeling the need for large scale social revolution. Because I am. In fact, I have renounced my life in exchange for a just social system applicable to all human beings. This is quite a big thing for me (I’ll have you know) as I am a physics undergraduate, with a life of luxury almost guaranteed for me under our current social system.

 But the only way I can feel ”true” … the only world I feel I can bring a child into, is a world where each individual human is encouraged to be a productive and happy member of a world society. I do not feel I can live as a parasite, living off the labour of my third world counterparts.  

So I continue my degree … I struggle on, knowing as I work (or laze about when I cannot be bothered to work, ) that some poor soul(s) is/are labouring for my bread, or the copper for my computer , or the nylon for my nikes. When I finish my degree, I will (no doubt) begin working for a successful multinational corporation, exploiting the children of those who now labour for me.

In 2012 many people believe that the world will come to an end, based on the abstruse conjectures around the mayan calendrical system. By this time, I will be working deep within the bowels of said corporation. My true friends, my soldiers, true humans, true revolutionaries, will also be working deep in the corporate structure, across many fields.  Perhaps, dear reader, you will be too. You see, I believe there is a significance to the mayan calendrical system. I believe, that at the end of this baktun 12 in 2012 (which began with cortez arriving in mexico,) the people of the former colonial powers should recognize their obligations to the people who have been our slaves for half a millenia. 

Bringing this full circle, my life goal is world revolution against the abstract legal systems which force our society into a perverse master-slave system by 2017. Many friends of mine will follow me in this. I would be interested in an indication from all visitors of this site of their interest in a general revolt against established models of society. I don’t claim to have the answer. I just want to know, how many of you want to find one ?

 For Peace, Love, Sustainable Living, and a Neo-society of open humans :

Yours, Mike McNally

 P.S. mcnallers@hotmail.com if you are interested in non-violent world revolution in our lifetime. And please comment, even if you think I am a joke, or clinically naive. Or, perhaps, you want to hear more. I will oblige.

     

To say that I’m indignant over this bit of news would be an understatement. I support a woman’s right to chose under any circumstances, and I find the idea that there’s not even a provision for a woman’s health to be…deplorable, to say the least.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_abortion

Justices uphold abortion procedure ban

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 9 minutes ago

The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority gave anti-abortion forces a landmark victory Wednesday in a 5-4 decision that bans a controversial abortion procedure nationwide and sets the stage for further restrictions.

It was a long-awaited and resounding win that abortion opponents had hoped to gain from a court pushed to the right by President Bush’s appointees.

For the first time since the court established a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973, the justices said the Constitution permits a nationwide prohibition on a specific abortion method. The court’s liberal justices, in dissent, said the ruling chipped away at abortion rights.

The 5-4 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

Siding with Kennedy were Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The law is constitutional despite not containing an exception that would allow the procedure if needed to preserve a woman’s health, Kennedy said. “The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice,” he wrote in the majority opinion.

Doctors who violate the law could face up to two years in federal prison. The law has not taken effect, pending the outcome of the legal fight.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the ruling “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court.”

Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the Bellevue, Neb., doctor who challenged the federal ban, said, “I am afraid the Supreme Court has just opened the door to an all-out assault on” the 1973 ruling in Roe. Wade.

The administration defended the law as drawing a bright line between abortion and infanticide.

Reacting to the ruling, Bush said that it affirms the progress his administration has made to defend the “sanctity of life.”

“I am pleased that the Supreme Court has upheld a law that prohibits the abhorrent procedure of partial birth abortion,” he said. “Today’s decision affirms that the Constitution does not stand in the way of the people’s representatives enacting laws reflecting the compassion and humanity of America.”

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how — not whether — to perform an abortion.

Abortion rights groups as well as the leading association of obstetricians and gynecologists have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although Kennedy said alternate, more widely used procedures remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.

“I applaud the Court for its ruling today, and my hope is that it sets the stage for further progress in the fight to ensure our nation’s laws respect the sanctity of unborn human life,” said Rep. John Boehner (news, bio, voting record) of Ohio, Republican leader in the House of Representatives.

Jay Sekulow, a prominent abortion opponent who is chief counsel for the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said, “This is the most monumental win on the abortion issue that we have ever had.”

Said Eve Gartner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America: “This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women’s health and safety. … This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them.” She had argued that point before the justices.

More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90 percent of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Wednesday’s ruling. The Guttmacher Institute says 2,200 dilation and extraction procedures — the medical term most often used by doctors — were performed in 2000, the latest figures available.

Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

“Today’s decision is alarming,” Ginsburg wrote in dissent for the court’s liberal bloc. She said the ruling “refuses to take … seriously” previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision “tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.”

Ginsburg said that for the first time since the court established a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973, “the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.”

She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman’s uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.

Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternate method — dismembering the fetus in the uterus — is available and, indeed, much more common.

In 2000, the court with key differences in its membership struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortions in a challenge also brought by Carhart. Writing for a 5-4 majority at that time, Justice Breyer said the law imposed an undue burden on a woman’s right to make an abortion decision in part because it lacked a health exception.

The Republican-controlled Congress responded in 2003 by passing a federal law that asserted the procedure is gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary to preserve a woman’s health. That statement was designed to overcome the health exception to restrictions that the court has demanded in abortion cases.

But federal judges in California, Nebraska and New York said the law was unconstitutional, and three appellate courts agreed. The Supreme Court accepted appeals from California and Nebraska, setting up Wednesday’s ruling.

Kennedy’s dissent in 2000 was so strong that few court watchers expected him to take a different view of the current case.

Kennedy acknowledged continuing disagreement about the procedure within the medical community. In the past, courts have cited that uncertainty as a reason to allow the disputed procedure.

“The medical uncertainty over whether the Act’s prohibition creates significant health risks provides a sufficient basis to conclude … that the Act does not impose an undue burden,” Kennedy said Wednesday.

While the court upheld the law against a broad attack on its constitutionality, Kennedy said the court could entertain a challenge in which a doctor found it necessary to perform the banned procedure on a patient suffering certain medical complications.

The law allows the procedure to be performed when a woman’s life is in jeopardy.

The cases are Gonzales v. Carhart, 05-380, and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, 05-1382.

A post was made here earlier today at the Irregular Times Diaries by someone calling herself lilmiss. Lilmiss wrote that we ought to vote for John McCain for President in 2008 because McCain is a man “who will stand his ground”.

Stand his ground? John McCain? Sadly, Senator McCain is more like a man who ground his stand.

Senator McCain’s stand used to be that he was against torture. Sadly, in 2006, John McCain ground that stand to a pulp when he voted for the Military Commissions Act.

John McCain did a classic flip flop when he supported the Military Commissions Act. You see, John McCain was against it, before he voted for it.

First, John McCain made a big deal about how he could never support the Military Commissions Act because it legalized torture, and he would never, ever support that. Then, he Mccain met with George W. Bush to negotiate an acceptable compromise. McCain emerged with what he said was a compromise that would not allow torture, but then, over the weekend, the Senate Republicans changed it all right back so that torture would be legalized by the new law once again.

Then, John McCain voted for it anyway. John McCain voted for torture.

John McCain talks about principles, and doing what’s right, but talk is cheap. Watch what John McCain actually does. When the going gets tough, John McCain grounds his stand.

Man, this Sam Adams quote is just awesome:

“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

Someone happened by the Irregular Times web site tonight and left a message about something called Project Hamad. The project, in short, exists in order to bring attention to the plight of a man named Adel Hamad, a prisoner in the America gulag at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The federal government says that Adel Hamad is a terrorist.

I say that Adel Hamad is innocent.

How can I say that Adel Hamad is innocent? Well, how can the federal government of the United States of America declare that Adel Hamad is a terrorist?

The simple truth that Americans have forgotten is that I have solid legal standing to say that Adel Hamad is innocent, and the U.S. federal government has no legal standing to say that Adel Hamad is guilty of terrorism.

The simple truth that Americans have forgotten is that our legal system is based upon the presumption of innocence. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently, in the past, that it is a fundamental aspect of America law that a person accused of a crime is considered innocent until that person is proven to be guilty.

The federal government has not proven that Adel Hamad is guilty. The government has not brought any evidence against Adel Hamad before the public. The government has not put Adel Hamad on trial. The government has not even charged Adel Hamad with a crime. The government has not given anyone any reason to believe that Adel Hamad is guilty of anything.

So, I say that Adel Hamad is innnocent. I say that the government of the United States of America is imprisoning an innocent man. I will continue to say this, until I am proven wrong, until Adel Hamad is proven guilty. And so, I am joining Project Hamad.

Feel squeamish about that? Why? Because the name of the organization is Project Hamad? Because you think that makes the group sound like it’s some kind of terrorist front organization? Well, maybe it is, but then again, maybe Amway is a terrorist front organization. We can speculate on and on about who might be secretly coordinating with terrorist groups. The people at the Department of Homeland Security would probably love us to do that. But it’s paranoid to do so.

Besides, what reason do you have to think that Project Hamad is a terrorist group, other than the name Hamad in the title. It’s not a European name, that’s for sure, but what difference does that make? Are we now supposed to assume that all people of non-European descent are likely terrorists? That’s the mindset of people who suspect Barack Obama because his last name sounds like Osama and his middle name is Hussein. I won’t engage in that kind of ethnic hatred.

Here’s all that joining Project Hamad requires: You have to agree to the following statement:

“I believe people detained by the U.S. government have the right to:
— know the charges against them
— have access to a lawyer
— be able to have the merits of their case reviewed by a federally appointed judge”

The federal government of the United States of America has declared that people do not have these rights. Congress has assented to that declaration by passing the Military Commissions Act. Now, you have to decide whether you will be complicit.

Will you join Project Hamad, or are you too afraid to do so? Do you agree that these rights no longer exist?

As for myself, once more, I say that Adel Hamad is innocent.

Why do I insist on saying this? Because it’s the American way, that’s why.

Democratic candidate for President Mike Gravel has called for an end to the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy instituted by President Bill Clinton, which confirmed that the military has the right to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation, but suggested that people try to look the other way and pretend that nothing was going on. Mike Gravel can see what other politicians refuse to see see - that it is hypocritical to say that our soldiers are fighting for freedom when we won’t even allow them to have basic freedoms themselves.

Support our troops but discriminate against them? That’s the policy the Republicans follow… and some Democrats too. I wonder how Hillary Clinton justifies her support for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell discrimination against gays and lesbians. And how about Al Gore? Let’s not forget that, as Vice President, Al Gore was complicit in the crafting of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Thanks to this discrimination, American soldiers are being sent to serve tour after tour after tour, and it’s driving them crazy. All this, in the name of a right wing sexual obsession.

This issue will be one that shows which Democrats are truly fit to lead as President come 2009.

Progressives have the tendency to revile the United States as the center of Homeland Security authoritarianism, and to look to Europe for a more liberal-minded alternative. They’re correct to fear the America’s growing security state, but quite wrong to imagine that Europe will offer a refuge of enlightened liberalism.

News came out today in a new European Union report indicating that the governments of Britain, Poland, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus all knew about the program of secret, illegal CIA prisons where people were held and tortured without legal authority and without criminal charge.

The Europeans knew about it, and went along with it.

Is there no refuge in the world where liberty is still valued?

No, probably not.

Ya think “unlawful enemy combatant” would look good in needlepoint?

I stand before you this day to declare that I, your obedient servant, may be in violation of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Specifically, it is within the provisions of the bill that allow for President Bush, via his minions, to deem me an “unlawful enemy combatant” for any poem, commentary or statement I have ever made, impugning his or his administration’s frighteningly ineffective and actively dangerous efforts to end global terrorism.

We’re half way around the world, bombing people who have done nothing to us. The administration seeks to influence policies and elections in other countries, and threatens intervention if they do not toe our political line. Isn’t that what we fought against during the cold war? Didn’t we stand against the Communists to keep them from venturing into other countries? I am not a conspiracy-theory left wing nut job, but I am way past offended that this administration sees their job as remaking the United States of America in the image of the late UNlamented Soviet Union. Democracy at gunpoint… if that isn’t an oxymoron, then President Bush can pronounce ‘nuclear’.

I cannot and will not be silenced by toadies like Donald Rumsfeld, who has never risked his overweight, coronary-ready ass for his country but presumes to tell ‘the faithful’ that he knows what will make us victorious in war. What he ‘knows’ is how to profit from corporate involvement in war, and how to make a few bucks for his friends in the bargain.

I shan’t be deterred by the religious right, put off by the neocondescending disinformation machine, or undermined by the unfair, unbalanced, untrue and unprincipled Fox News Network.

I will not be haunted the Coultergeist, shadowed by the government, governed by the incompetent or overruled by the supposed rulers of what was, until the MCA of ‘ought-six, a country both democratic and free.

Calling this law wrong is the understatement of the century. I am, as all Americans should be, ashamed for my nation and for the Great American Experiment, whose demise this law may very well portend.

With that, a final word… I have a house that’s paid for, a really cool motorcycle and a new love of my life…… if I disappear, I sure as hell didn’t run away.

Later.

Hillary Clinton has gone insane. She wants to run for President in 2008, so what has she done? Hillary Clinton has declared that she thinks torture is a good idea.

No kidding. Senator Hillary Clinton said of torture last week, “there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing that.”

No, Senator Clinton. No, there doesn’t. There doesn’t have to be any lawful authority for pursuing torture. What there has to be is a return to the America in which the Bill of Rights means something more than “yadda, yadda, yadda”. The Bill of Rights forbids, absolutely, cruel and unusual punishment. Do you not support the Bill of Rights anymore, Senator Clinton?

I’m a New Yorker, Senator Clinton, but you’re not getting my vote. Not for United States Senate, and sure as hell not for President of the United States.

Some people just can’t win for losing, can they? When I saw this on Yahoo News I was about to go to sleep, so I figured that if it wasn’t mentioned when I woke up I’d post it.

So here it is:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061021/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_detainees

U.S. jailed man once tortured by Taliban

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press WriterSat Oct 21, 8:11 AM ET

Abdul Rahim insists he’s an apolitical student who fled a strict father. But he’s fallen into a black hole in the war on terror in which first the Taliban and then the United States imprisoned him as an enemy of the state.

Arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2000, Rahim says al-Qaida leaders burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he “confessed” to spying for the United States.

U.S. forces took the young Kurd from Syria into custody in January 2002 after the Taliban fled his prison. Accusing him of being an al-Qaida terrorist, U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours, he says. He’s been held ever since as an enemy combatant.

Rahim’s story is one of several emerging from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as defense lawyers make bids to free their clients while the Bush administration tries to use a new law to lock them out of federal courts.

After the Supreme Court overturned President Bush’s plans for commissions to try detainees, Bush obtained a new law from Congress barring federal courts from hearing appeals for release by any alien “properly detained as an enemy combatant.” The Justice Department told district and appellate judges this week they no longer have jurisdiction to hear dozens of such pending cases.

A court fight over that is certain.

Calling the move to strip jurisdiction “a direct attack on our constitutional structure,” Federal Public Defender Steven T. Wax in Portland, Ore., said, “We will litigate that as hard as we can in whatever forum we can find, because they are wrong.”

Other detainees whose lawyers filed new evidence in U.S. District Court motions this month include:

Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese charity worker arrested at 1:30 a.m. July 18, 2002, in his Peshawar, Pakistan, apartment. Co-workers swear he was a hospital administrator with no connection to terrorists. A dissenting U.S. Army major on the panel that reviewed the unclassified and secret evidence against him called it “unconscionable” to detain him because some employees of the same charity may have supported terrorist ideals.

Nazar “Chaman” Gul, a 29-year-old Afghani who thought he was working as an armed fuel depot guard for the Karzi government installed by U.S. forces. The man who hired him swears that was the case, but he is accused of being a member of a terrorist group. The lawyers say he has been mistaken for a commander of that terror group, named Chaman Gul, also held at Guantanamo.

All three are represented by Wax and his assistants. Wax’s staff traveled to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to gather dozens of sworn statements from co-workers, relatives, fellow inmates and people who knew these detainees but haven’t spoken to them in years. These newly filed accounts substantiate details of the detainees’ denials that they were terrorists.

“These clients are not enemy combatants,” Wax said in an interview. The new law “does not apply to people who are not enemy combatants,” he said.

Wax said it would be unconstitutional to apply the jurisdiction-stripping bill retroactively to existing cases. And he said the Supreme Court has ruled before that it has the final say over its jurisdiction in these so-called habeas corpus petitions for release from custody. Following President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus for prisoners of war, the high court in 1866 set a man free after finding he was not a prisoner of war, Wax noted.

The government feels differently about Wax’s clients.

“Multiple reviews have been conducted since each detained enemy fighter was captured, including for these three individuals,” said a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon. “There is a significant amount of evidence, both unclassified and classified, which supports continued detention of these detainees and others at Guantanamo.”

Now 28, Rahim, buttressed by testimony from friends and relatives, says he wound up in Afghanistan in a bid to escape his father, a strict teacher of Islamic education who objected to his borrowing money outside the family for a college trip. With his father holding his passport, he tried futilely to get from his home in the United Arab Emirates to Europe or Canada.

Finally a friendly diplomat got him deported to Afghanistan where he and others say he hoped to be declared a refugee and moved to Europe by international aid agencies. He says the Taliban conscripted him and sent him against his will to the Al Farouq terrorist training camp. When he tried to leave 18 days later, they imprisoned him, he says.

In spring 2000, Abu Dhabi television broadcast a video of a tearful, fidgeting Rahim saying a U.S. agent recruited him to find Osama bin Laden. “I deserve to die … but if the Taliban let me live, I want to spend the next 22 years fighting for jihad,” he said.

On Jan. 17, 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said U.S. forces found five videotapes in the ruined Afghan home of bin Laden aide Mohammed Atef — one of the men Rahim says directed his torture. Ashcroft said the tapes show young men delivering “martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists” and identified one as “Abd Rahim.”

Rahim’s attorney Stephen Sady said any Taliban tapes of Rahim “were the product of torture” and no different from false confessions Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made to stay alive in a North Vietnamese prison.

“After two years the Americans came and saved me from the prison,” Rahim told U.S. officers. “I told them about the videotape the Taliban made of me … it created confusion to the point that the Americans believed I was working with al-Qaida.”

He added: “Nothing changed in my life. I was taken from prison to prison.”

Welcome to the United States of Fear, ruled by King Shrub II.

Tim Holden is a Democrat who sits in Congress and isn’t worth much at all. Occasionally, he votes the right way on a piece of legislation, but more often, he votes like a stinking right wing Republican, and when Tim Holden goes the wrong way, he causes a lot of damage. His regressive right wing legislative score is higher than his progressive record.

The latest and greatest example: Democrat Tim Holden abandoned the mainstream of the Democratic Party to join forces with George W. Bush and vote in favor of the Military Commissions Act.

Don’t know about the Military Commissions Act? Well, let me inform you: This new law, signed into effect by President Bush just yesterday, revokes habeas corpus, ends enforcement of the Geneva Conventions, gives amnesty to George W. Bush for any war crimes he has committed, sets up kangaroo courts to replace our system of justice, and gives the President the power to throw anyone into prison without crimnal charges and without any explanation to anyone.

How could Tim Holden do it? How could he do such a horrible thing? How could he betray us in such a dramatic fashion?

The answer is depressingly simple: Tim Holden doesn’t have anyone opposing him for re-election in 2006, so he can afford to be as dirty and nasty as he wants to be. There was no Democratic primary challenge to Tim Holden in 2006, and Matthew Wertz, the Republican opponent to Tim Holden, withdrew from the race. So, there was no one to hold Tim Holden accountable.

Democrats of Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district, in Dauphin County, Lebanon County, Schuylkill County, Berks County and Perry County, please do NOT support Tim Holden for re-election in 2008. Tim Holden has betrayed the Democratic Party over and over again. Don’t take it lying down. Find someone, a real Democrat with solid progressive values, to challenge Tim Holden in 2008, and restore the good name of Pennsyvlania’s Democrats.

Robyn Blumner is a columnist for my hometown newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, and she always has something interesting to say. But in yesterday’s column, she shook me to the bones with her essay on the end of “The Great American Experiment in Liberty.”

E Pluribus Unum be damned. Here’s America’s new motto: If we can’t pronounce your name, we don’t care what happens to you. Now let us get back to our Happy Meals.

How was your lunch?

We at Irregular Times used to have a nice campaign bumper sticker for Maine Democratic Congressman Mike Michaud. It was there for Michaud’s supporters to find online, and put on their cars to help spread the word that the people in Michael Michaud’s district supported him.

No more.

Mike Michaud betrayed Maine today. Mike Michaud betrayed Democrats today. Mike Michaud betrayed all America today when he voted for H.R. 6166, a bill that revokes the right of habeas corpus, legalizes torture, gives George W. Bush retroactive immunity from prosecution for war crimes and provides blanked immunity to other war criminals, allows secret evidence to be used against suspects, removes the right to a speedy trial, and even gave police the right to enter your home and search through your things without getting a search warrant.

Shame on you, Michael Michaud, for voting for this piece of totalitarian, anti-freedom legislation. You no longer have the support of Irregular Times.

That means that now, whenever voters in Maine search for the name Michael Michaud on Google or in the CafePress search engine, they will find the following new bumper sticker design where the old pro-Michaud bumper sticker used to be.

We’ll be taking this action for all the Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted for HR 6166 today. This issue is bigger than partisanship. It’s about the values of the Revolution of 1776. It’s about defending American freedom from tyranny.

Yet more AP goodness about the loving treatment by American soldiers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/in_american_hands

U.S. war prisons legal vacuum for 14,000

By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

“It was hard to believe I’d get out,” Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release — without charge — last month. “I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell.”

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.

Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were “mistakes,” U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.

Defenders of the system, which has only grown since soldiers’ photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world, say it’s an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep suspected terrorists out of action.

Every U.S. detainee in Iraq “is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.

But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Building for the Long Term

Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on Sept. 6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced nakedness, hooding, stress positions and other abusive techniques.

The same day, President Bush said the CIA’s secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied, and 14 terror suspects from them sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial in military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the tribunal system, however, and the White House and Congress are now wrestling over the legal structure of such trials.

Living conditions for detainees may be improving as well. The U.S. military cites the toilets of Bagram, Afghanistan: In a cavernous old building at that air base, hundreds of detainees in their communal cages now have indoor plumbing and privacy screens, instead of exposed chamber pots.

Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.

Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons — unknown in number and location — remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn’t cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law’s oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.

“If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. “You can’t have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there.”

The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the “war on terror” ends — as it determines.

“I don’t think we’ve gotten to the question of how long,” said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy. “When we get up to ‘forever,’ I think it will be tested” in court, he said.

The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo. This fall it expects to open a new, $30-million maximum-security wing at its prison complex there, a concrete-and-steel structure replacing more temporary camps.

In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they opened a $60-million, state-of-the-art detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad’s airport. The Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just “security detainees” held “for imperative reasons of security,” spokesman Curry said, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.

Questions of Law, Sovereignty

President Bush laid out the U.S. position in a speech Sept. 6.

“These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation,” he said. “We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle.”

But others say there’s no need to hold these thousands outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared last March that the extent of arbitrary detention here is “not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security.”

Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki’s 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq’s national rights.

“As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person,” said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. “The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary.”

At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been “a daily request” that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.

There’s no guarantee the Americans’ 13,000 detainees would fare better under control of the Iraqi government, which U.N. officials say holds 15,000 prisoners.

But little has changed because of these requests. When the Americans formally turned over Abu Ghraib prison to Iraqi control on Sept. 2, it was empty but its 3,000 prisoners remained in U.S. custody, shifted to Camp Cropper.

Life in Custody

The cases of U.S.-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of U.S. military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends criminal charges against some, release for others. As of Sept. 9, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put 1,445 on trial, convicting 1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the shooting of a U.S. Marine.

Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the U.S. command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by local military units and never shipped to major prisons.

Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later joined or rejoined the insurgency.

The review process is too slow, say U.N. officials. Until they are released, often families don’t know where their men are — the prisoners are usually men — or even whether they’re in American hands.

Ex-detainee Mouayad Yasin Hassan, 31, seized in April 2004 as a suspected Sunni Muslim insurgent, said he wasn’t allowed to obtain a lawyer or contact his family during 13 months at Abu Ghraib and Bucca, where he was interrogated incessantly. When he asked why he was in prison, he said, the answer was, “We keep you for security reasons.”

Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.

“Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood,” he quoted an interrogator as saying, “or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years.”

As with others, Karim’s confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. “I will hate Americans for the rest of my life,” he said.

As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002-2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have leaked out. The U.S. military is believed holding about 500 detainees — most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.

The United States plans to cede control of its Afghan detainees by early next year, five years after invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaida’s base and bring down the Taliban government. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram exist in a legal vacuum like that elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.

“There’s been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it,” said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.

Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.

Guantanamo received its first prisoners from Afghanistan — chained, wearing blacked-out goggles — in January 2002. A total of 770 detainees were sent there. Its population today of Afghans, Arabs and others, stands at 455.

Described as the most dangerous of America’s “war on terror” prisoners, only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown in to Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4.

Plans for their trials are on hold, however, because of a Supreme Court ruling in June against the Bush administration’s plan for military tribunals.

The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the U.S. Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions by abrogating prisoners’ rights. In a sometimes contentious debate, the White House and Congress are trying to agree on a new, acceptable trial plan.

Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing claims that terrorist suspects were so-called “unlawful combatants” unprotected by international law, the Bush administration has taken steps recognizing that the Geneva Conventions’ legal and human rights do extend to imprisoned al-Qaida militants. At the same time, however, the new White House proposal on tribunals retains such controversial features as denying defendants access to some evidence against them.

In his Sept. 6 speech, Bush acknowledged for the first time the existence of the CIA’s secret prisons, believed established at military bases or safehouses in such places as Egypt, Indonesia and eastern Europe. That network, uncovered by journalists, had been condemned by U.N. authorities and investigated by the Council of Europe.

The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced, but will remain a future option for CIA detentions and interrogation.

Louise Arbour, U.N. human rights chief, is urging Bush to abolish the CIA prisons altogether, as ripe for “abusive conduct.” The CIA’s techniques for extracting information from prisoners still remain secret, she noted.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s willingness to resort to “extraordinary rendition,” transferring suspects to other nations where they might be tortured, appears unchanged.

Prosecutions and Memories

The exposure of sadistic abuse, torture and death at Abu Ghraib two years ago touched off a flood of courts-martial of mostly lower-ranking U.S. soldiers. Overall, about 800 investigations of alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to action against more than 250 service personnel, including 89 convicted at courts-martial, U.S. diplomats told the United Nations in May.

Critics protest that penalties have been too soft and too little has been done, particularly in tracing inhumane interrogation methods from the far-flung islands of the overseas prison system back to policies set by high-ranking officials.

In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail. The group reported last February that in almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.

Looking back, the United States overreacted in its treatment of detainees after Sept. 11, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted American scholar of international law.

It was understandable, the Princeton University dean said, but now “we have to restore a balance between security and rights that is consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs.”

Otherwise, she said, “history will look back and say that we took a dangerous and deeply wrong turn.”

Back here in Baghdad, at the Alawi bus station, a gritty, noisy hub far from the meeting rooms of Washington and Geneva, women gather with fading hopes whenever a new prisoner release is announced.

As she watched one recent day for a bus from distant Camp Bucca, one mother wept and told her story.

“The Americans arrested my son, my brother and his friend,” said Zahraa Alyat, 42. “The Americans arrested them October 16, 2005. They left together and I don’t know anything about them.”

The bus pulled up. A few dozen men stepped off, some blindfolded, some bound, none with any luggage, none with familiar faces.

As the distraught women straggled away once more, one ex-prisoner, 18-year-old Bilal Kadhim Muhssin, spotted U.S. troops nearby.

“Americans,” he muttered in fear. “Oh, my God, don’t say that name,” and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — The Associated Press staff in Baghdad and AP writers Andrew Selsky in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Matthew Pennington in Kabul, Afghanistan; Anne Plummer Flaherty in Washington, and Charles J. Hanley in New York contributed to this report.

I just saw this when I logged onto YIM. I thought everyone here would like to see it.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/photographer_detained

U.S. holds AP photographer in Iraq 5 mos

By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

“We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable,” said Tom Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure.”

Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide — 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.

In Hussein’s case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn’t make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.

“Journalists have always had relationships with people that others might find unsavory,” she said. “We’re not in this to choose sides, we’re to report what’s going on from all sides.”

AP executives in New York and Baghdad have sought to persuade U.S. officials to provide additional information about allegations against Hussein and to have his case transferred to the Iraqi criminal justice system. The AP contacted military leaders in Iraq and the Pentagon, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein’s imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.

One of Hussein’s photos was part of a package of 20 photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography last year. His contribution was an image of four insurgents in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during the U.S.-led offensive in the city in November 2004.

In what several AP editors described as a typical path for locally hired staff in the midst of a conflict, Hussein, a shopkeeper who sold cell phones and computers in Fallujah, was hired in the city as a general helper because of his local knowledge.

As the situation in Fallujah eroded in 2004, he expressed a desire to become a photographer. Hussein was given training and camera equipment and hired in September of that year as a freelancer, paid on a per-picture basis, according to Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography. A month later, he was put on a monthly retainer.

During the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah in November 2004, he stayed on after his family fled. “He had good access. He was able to photograph not only the results of the attacks on Fallujah, he was also able to photograph members of the insurgency on occasion,” Lyon said. “That was very difficult to achieve at that time.”

After fleeing later in the offensive, leaving his camera behind in the rush to escape, Hussein arrived in Baghdad, where the AP gave him a new camera. He then went to work in Ramadi which, like Fallujah, has been a center of insurgent violence.

In its own effort to determine whether Hussein had gotten too close the insurgency, the AP has reviewed his work record, interviewed senior photo editors who worked on his images and examined all 420 photographs in the news cooperative’s archives that were taken by Hussein, Lyon said.

The military in Iraq has frequently detained journalists who arrive quickly at scenes of violence, accusing them of getting advance notice from insurgents, Lyon said. But “that’s just good journalism. Getting to the event quickly is something that characterizes good journalism anywhere in the world. It does not indicate prior knowledge,” he said.

Out of Hussein’s body of work, only 37 photos show insurgents or people who could be insurgents, Lyon said. “The vast majority of the 420 images show the aftermath or the results of the conflict — blown up houses, wounded people, dead people, street scenes,” he said.

Only four photos show the wreckage of still-burning U.S. military vehicles.

“Do we know absolutely everything about him, and what he did before he joined us? No. Are we satisfied that what he did since he joined us was appropriate for the level of work we expected from him? Yes,” Lyon said. “When we reviewed the work he submitted to us, we found it appropriate to what we’d asked him to do.”

The AP does not knowingly hire combatants or anyone who is part of a story, company executives said. But hiring competent local staff in combat areas is vital to the news service, because often only local people can pick their way around the streets with a reasonable degree of safety.

“We want people who are not part of a story. Sometimes it is a judgment call. If someone seems to be thuggish, or like a fighter, you certainly wouldn’t hire them,” Daniszewski said. After they are hired, their work is checked carefully for signs of bias.

Lyon said every image from local photographers is always “thoroughly checked and vetted” by experienced editors. “In every case where there have been images of insurgents, questions have been asked about circumstances under which the image was taken, and what the image shows,” he said.

Executives said it’s not uncommon for AP news people to be picked up by coalition forces and detained for hours, days or occasionally weeks, but never this long. Several hundred journalists in Iraq have been detained, some briefly and some for several weeks, according to Scott Horton, a New York-based lawyer hired by the AP to work on Hussein’s case.

Horton also worked on behalf of an Iraqi cameraman employed by CBS, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, who was detained for one year before his case was sent to an Iraqi court on charges of insurgent activity. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.

AP officials emphasized the military has not provided the company concrete evidence of its claims against Bilal Hussein, or provided him a chance to offer a defense.

“He’s a Sunni Arab from a tribe in that area. I’m sure he does know some nasty people. But is he a participant in the insurgency? I don’t think that’s been proven,” Daniszewski said.

Information provided to the AP by the military to support the continued detention hasn’t withstood scrutiny, when it could be checked, Daniszewski said.

For example, he said, the AP had been told that Hussein was involved with the kidnapping of two Arab journalists in Ramadi.

But those journalists, tracked down by the AP, said Hussein had helped them after they were released by their captors without money or a vehicle in a dangerous part of Ramadi. After a journalist acquaintance put them in touch with Hussein, the photographer picked them up, gave them shelter and helped get them out of town, they said.

The journalists said they had never been contacted by multinational forces for their account.

Horton said the military has provided contradictory accounts of whether Hussein himself was a U.S. target last April or if he was caught up in a broader sweep.

The military said bomb-making materials were found in the apartment where Hussein was captured but it never detailed what those materials were. The military said he tested positive for traces of explosives. Horton said that was virtually guaranteed for anyone on the streets of Ramadi at that time.

Hussein has been a frequent target of conservative critics on the Internet, who raised questions about his images months before the military detained him. One blogger and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote about Hussein’s detention on the day of his arrest, saying she’d been tipped by a military source.

Carroll said the role of journalists can be misconstrued and make them a target of critics. But that criticism is misplaced, she said.

“How can you know what a conflict is like if you’re only with one side of the combatants?” she said. “Journalism doesn’t work if we don’t report and photograph all sides.”

On one of my other commonly visited web-sites I posted an artical after reading this post by Peregrin Wood and it has sparked off a debate on terrorists and torture.

One of the members, whom I disagree with (to put it nicely and under a heaping helping of sugar) and whom is a conservative (but not a republican, oh no, perish the thought!) said he thinks torture should be illegal but is just fine with “extreme tactics.” This statement got me thinking about an anti-smoking commercial I once saw.

Tell me, if I take a rabid, vicious, snarling, snapping, growling German Shepherd named Fang and rename him “Fluffy”…is anyone gonna want to pet him?

That’s all they’re doing now. It’s not torture, it’s “extreme tactics!” Torture is immoral and illegal! We’re not doing anything illegal; we’re just using “extreme tactics.” That’s a mighty thick coat of veneer and sugar.

A pile of shit by any other name is still a pile of shit. If I call it mud, will the kids want to play in it?

Today, US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that President George W. Bush violated the Constitution and broke the law when he set up and executed the program to spy on Americans’ telephone calls without a search warrant or the legally required approval of a FISA court.

I’m reading through her ruling to see exactly what she has to say on the case. It’s great reading, in spots, reminding us about what makes this case so important.

Judge Diggs Taylor chose a particular quotation from, written by Justice Earl Warren, in the case U.S. v. Robel in 1967, to conclude her ruling. In doing so, she is sending a clear message to the citizens of the United States of America. Will we listen?

“Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of . . . those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.”

After posting this on this other website I frequent, I felt it was too much for me to keep it only on one site. I’m reposting everything I’ve written there with just a few alterations that address that board specifically.

Before logging on, I had to sit for a while and seriously consider whether or not to post this. It’s a link to a flash video and I feel I should give Echolette credit because she sent me this a long time ago after she and I had a discussion about Pit Bulls, more specifically American Pit Bull Terriers, and back then I couldn’t watch it without crying.

I know, it’s unmanly for me to admit that I cried when I saw it but fuck all that shit, it’s the truth.

I bring this topic up because recently my dad and I adopted two stray dogs off the streets, the first of which was a female American Pit Bull Terrier whom my dad named Leona.

I feel I should tell the story of how we came about to adopting her.

For a long time (all my life, in fact) I had been bugging my parents for a dog. I’ve always been a cat person, always loved cats, always will love them. However, I had always felt that I was missing out on something when it came to cats and dogs and I’d always wanted a pet dog. I have three favorite breeds and I came about them in different ways and at different times.

My first love has been the Siberian Husky. The first time I saw it as a little kid that breed struck me as the most beautiful on earth. Everything about them was gorgeous from their eyes to their coats. I’ve been around a few of them and I’ve found them to be a good dog to have as a pet, so long as you don’t own other small animals and have a fence that’ll go down a few feet.

The second dog I’ve got on my favorites list is the German Shepherd for many of the same reasons as the Siberian Husky. But I think the real reason I was drawn to that type of dog was from watching the movie K-9 with Jim Belushi and Jerry Lee. That dog cracked me up. Recently my dad took me to one of his friend’s and he and his wife owned a pure blood German Shepherd named Queen. That dog was a goof, as long as you threw her tennis ball she’d adore you.

My third favorite dog was the Pit Bull. My friend Tim owned a Pit Bull named Dro and I had been around them off and on for a long, long time. The first time I met Dro I was scared shitless, not because I had heard all the bad news about Pit Bulls but because here’s this 80 pound mass of drooling dog and he’s wantin’ to jump on me. Being still in my early to mid teens I was scared shitless of that dog for a long time. The first time I’d met him, Tim opened the door and I swear it would have turned into a scene right out of Marmaduke if he hadn’t caught Dro by the collar. In all the years that I knew him he never once tried to bite me and only bit one person, that being a woman who surprised him at the wrong moment.

After my initial shock it took me a long time to keep from tensing up when I’d see him. How long you ask? Days? Weeks? Heh, try years. At first it was a grudging pet once in a while but he was persistent and so lovable that I finally started playing with him. Yes, that old dog won me over and it damn near became that I’d spend more time with that dog than I would with Tim.

He had a few quirks that made him lovable, one of which was this one time he took Tim’s mom for a drag down 19th street. I’m not talking walking along and tugging her after him, I’m talking she was off her feet and he was dragging her along behind him. You might be thinking “Oh, that’s not right” but all Tim’s life I never looked at her as a good mother so I was busting up when I heard about that little stunt.

Another of the things he would do that was so endearing was that he would start howling whenever we would sing “Happy Birthday” or when Tim would play “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera. That dog had some since in him after all.

Now Tim’s uncle had been at war with his neighbors for a long time for whatever reason and normally I wouldn’t mention that had it not been for the fact that Tim was living with his uncle during this time. One day, Tim was coming home from his friend’s place when he saw everyone was out back and there was an animal control truck out front. He went into the backyard and found Dro in the neighbor’s back yard, cowering in their dog house with blood running down his face. The neighbors had called in saying he was a mad dog and because my state has a No Tolerance law, all a dog (Pit Bull) has to do is be accused of being rabid or trying to attack someone and it’ll be put down. To this day we are convinced that his neighbors attacked Dro then had him put down.

I think the bloody pipe laying by his neighbor’s back porch had something to do with that suspicion. To this day I miss Dro, but he was the dog that won me over into liking Pit Bulls.

Now, a few months ago my dad told me about a stray dog in the neighborhood that was scared of it’s own shadow. I asked what kind it was and he said he didn’t know. The way he kept talking he made it out to be a small dog and with a rare exception, I hate small dogs. Most of them are toe biters to me. After I asked him about it, he was saying “No, no, it’s a large dog. Looks kinda like a boxer.”

Anyway, I hadn’t seen this dog at all for about a week or two after dad told me about it until one day we were leaving and I saw this black dog in our next door neighbor’s yard looking curiously over at me. First second I saw it I said to myself “That’s a Pit Bull.” I told my dad this and he refused to believe me and I kept pressing the subject because I knew I was right, damn it. He kept telling himself and everyone else that it was a boxer/lab mix and I just gave him a look like that let him know I wasn’t buying it and would say that he was full of shit. After a few weeks of drilling it into his head he started saying “She might have some Pit Bull in her” and I was just thinking “duh.”

It wasn’t until one of his friends who had raised Pit Bulls said that she was a Pit Bull without a doubt and that was all it took to convince him and here I am sitting here furious and thinking “WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I BEEN SAYING FOR THE LAST TWO FUCKING MONTHS?!” Just…motherfuck, he won’t listen to me just because I’m his son. I guess in his eyes I’m still a little baby shitting my diaper and don’t know what I’m fucking talking about so I have to tell his friends to tell him.

But this is not a rant post.

The first time I saw this dog it was clear she had been abused. She was all skin and bones, terrified of everyone, and had even chewed her leash in half to run away and was dragging it behind her when she came to our block. Everyone on our corner took pity on her. The Vietnamese people who live on the corner let her stay in a dog house in their back yard. My dad took to putting some of our cat food out for her at night because it was during the closing winter months when she came to us and was still kinda chilly. He had taken to befriending her and it took a month before she warmed up to him. I took her a week to get used to me.

After a while we had not only coaxed her into our yard but also onto this old couch we have outside.

Heh, that couch was her first real security zone and once she got on it you couldn’t get her off short of picking her up and carrying her off. She was also curious about new places and really enjoyed seeing our jungle of a back yard.

After that, it took her another month and a half before she would even stick her nose inside the door. She was terrified of about everything, but she eventually came inside and staked out a spot by the front windows.

For a long time that was her spot and she’ll still go over there from time to time.

I think it was around then that we’d officially adopted her.

But since then she has come a long way from when we’d first met her. She’s still a little skittish around people, but she won’t bolt at the first sight of them. She can also be fairly lazy and a regular couch potato when inside. She’s taken to sleeping in the recliner I enjoy sitting in (that hussy) and she’s really good with kids.

People are drawn to her to such an extent that it’s really a sight to behold.

Now some of you may be wondering why I’m posting this on a political website but I feel that the subject of Pit Bulls are very much a matter of both personal beliefs and politics since the introduction of Breed Specific Legislation.

BLS is a law that will restrict or ban pit bull type dogs and list them as “vicious animals.” People say that it’s in their nature to be mean. They say that they’ll just suddenly snap without warning or that they’re more prone to biting than any other dog. This is an image that has been trotted around in the media and is largely untrue. This has become so prevalent that San Francisco has enacted a mandatory spaying/neutering of Pit Bull type dogs and Denver has enacted an outright ban and started seizing Pit Bulls from their owners and having them put to sleep.

People miss identify all sorts of dogs and will call them Pit Bulls because of their general appearance. People have said right and left that Leona looks like a boxer but the only reason she does is because her ears and tail haven’t been cut off. Because of that, more often than not people will think she’s some other breed. It is the flip side of this reason that people lump all these different dogs into the Pit Bull heading.

I have come to find out that Pit Bulls were bred to be aggressive towards other animals but friendly towards humans. However, when raised around other animals they’ll generally be a sweet and even tempered kind of dog.

Now I come to the original reason I created this topic.

I’ve been telling you all about my experiences with American Pit Bull Terriers so you can understand my point of view as an owner of one of these dogs and maybe get an idea of my own experiences with this breed.

When I created this post I did so after watching again that flash video Echolette sent me so long ago. For me, it has become even more…relevant.

I want to pass it along to everyone here but I feel the need to warn you, if you have the same attitude towards these animals as Echo and me, this video and the images in it will be burned into your memory for a long time. I urge you to see it, but if you’re squeamish go ahead and click the back button on your browser.

The Pit Bull Problem

I saw this linked from one web site I frequent to another that I visit less often, and I felt it was worth showing to everyone here. When I saw where this happened, I arched an eyebrow but in truth I wasn’t surprised. I have the misfortune of living in the same state so I know quite well what these people are like.

But, without farther adieu, I present you with the story written by Chester Smalkowski along with a foreword from the American Atheist News editor.

The original post can be found here.

JUST ANOTHER SALEM
by Chester Smalkowski

Web Posted: July 8, 2006

From the AANEWS Editor: Below, we are reproducing, “as is” and
un-edited, the account circulating on the internet and the
democraticunderground.com web site penned by Chester Smalkowski and
aptly titled “Just Another Salem.”

It is his personal story about the ordeal he and has family have been
swept up in after their daughter, Nicole, refused to join a prayer
circle during a basketball game at their local high school. Nicole,
instead, recited the “godless” Pledge of Allegiance.

From there, events went out of control. Chester Smalkowski and family
members attempted to hold a conversation with the high school
principal. That turned into a physical altercation, Mr. Smalkowski was
arrested under a battery of charges, and the authorities offered to
dismiss the case if the Atheist family fled the state.

monthly special American Atheists joined in the subsequent criminal
case, and Chester Smalkowski — battling incredible “Bible Belt” odds
in the courtroom — was found innocent of the charges. News of that
can be found on the American Atheists web site..

Edwin Kagin (ekagin@atheists.org), National Legal Director for
American Atheists, is preparing a federal action which will touch on a
number of issues in the Smalkowski case including violations of this
Atheist family’s civil rights.

Chester Smalkowski vented his thoughts about this experience on a
blog. AANEWS is reproducing this story for the benefit of our readers,
unedited and in its original format. This conveys the honest,
emotional, “from the heart” sentiments of Mr. Smalkowski, and
constitutes one man’s recollection of an agonizing experience due to
religious intolerance and fanaticism.

American Atheists welcomes support so that we may continue our efforts
on behalf of Chester Smalkowski and his family.

There are lessons to be learned. Perhaps the most important, though,
is that “it can happen here,” in America, in the year 2006.

— Conrad Goeringer,
AANEWS - American Atheists

JUST ANOTHER SALEM

The bailiff took the piece of paper from the foreman of the jury and
handed it to the Judge. He opened the paper and while staring at it he
nodded. The courtroom was silent and the jury stared straight ahead.

I have been in many situations where my life or limb were on the
line but I was still in the game and had a hand to play. But not here,
here I just sat waiting for the verdict.

Though I worried about being sent away for five years on bogus
charges, my dread was the Christian mob. They knew I must be found
guilty in order to slow or stop the civil case being filed in Federal
court. Since the start of my daughter’s stand against the public
schools disregard for the law of the land, it was imperative to run us
out of the county to make any civil action non valid. With me in jail
for five years running my family out would be a whole lot easier, or
so they might have thought.

The courtroom was packed for it is the Bible belt. There was no
love in this courtroom.

The loving Christians brought their children to hear the verdict.
They brought the town. They brought ministers. I even saw another
Judge in the back of the room. The Judge who in an earlier hearing
while slapping an inch thick stack of papers on his bench saying with
a list of witnesses this big you had better be a good boy. It was lies
then, it was lies now and the DA knew it! (She was later forced to
hand over a written statement she denied for over a year existed!)
People prayed openly for a conviction. Many holding their bibles.
During the trial the Prosecutions side of the courtroom was packed.
Only my son and Edwin Kagin’s wife, Helen sat behind me, but now there
was not enough room in the whole courtroom.

Yet now the so-called victim, the 325 lbs victim, the ex Marine,
hurrahs, was nowhere to be found. Neither was the woman assistant
district attorney anywhere to be found. Whose vindictive, bogus case
this was from the start.

What sort of place is this?

Well this is not the place for a little debate in a coffee shop
with the sweet salt air rolling up from San Francisco bay. This is a
place where the children write on their schoolbooks the south will
rise again. This is a place where they say that black people caused
slavery! Where they burn rock CD’s. Mormons are the tools of Satan.
That my daughter is gay cause only homosexuals vote for Kerry and
Christians vote for Bush. Atheists worship Satan! Where religious
fanaticism is fused with political rhetoric and political leaders
pander to this madness. This place has a sickness, a malignant disease
and it is spreading. Edwin saw it first hand.

There has not been many a trial with a Not Guilty verdict in this
county for years. The head DA is good friends with the self-righteous
in the courtroom and greets them all by name. You know the type.

Many old women in the courtroom are taking notes. Others have been
taking notes at every hearing for the past year and a half! They
strain to listen not wanting to miss one juicy word. With the pens and
pads they write continuously. The pads shaking with every push of the
pen. Even writing down what my children spoke amongst themselves.

Blue gray haired old Christian spinsters bitter for wasting all
those fruitful years now just waiting for those pearly gates. These
are truly the wicked. You have seen them before. With their bogus
self-righteousness they strut and sneer. How far we have not come.

Others had walked out into the hall and warned a police witness
saying that justice must be served, that justice better be served. The
judge called a hearing on the threat.

He warned the crowd that if it happens one more time he would have
no choice but to throw out the case. He was between a rock and a hard
place. He knows my lawyers are watching and the loving Christians are
out for my blood, and they are watching too. The law, elections and
politics were all in play. The Judge left the court for his chambers
and stayed away for a quite awhile.

The Christians, the loving Christians! Praying to a God whose wings
are dripping in the blood of innocent men, woman and children down
through the ages. Truly hypocrisy is one of their commandments and the
blood of the innocence one of their sacraments!

Christian against Christian, Christian against Moslem, Christian
against Mormon. Basically Christian against anyone or anything that
challenges their pathetic little fairy tale.

Go to any Indian reservation and see the lies and broken promises
by a country with “Under God” in their pledge.

I assume I need not have to explain about the loving hymns sung in
church on Sunday and beatings of black slaves on Monday. But on Monday
night the good old Master has a little tippy toe over to slave huts
for a little brown sugar. While the queen of the manor is in the
master bedroom past out on an opium tonic. Praise the Lord!

Well that was then but now the court was about to hear the verdict.
There was a feeding frenzy about to begin with the dirty little
atheist and his family put in their place with him in jail and the
family run out of town. Like the teacher told my daughter “This is a
Christian country and if you don’t like it get out!”

I could hear my heart beat in my ears and I dreaded the cheers from
the righteous mob that were about to begin. The pain of having my
family being in the front row to witness this swirling cesspool of
hatred come to its inevitable end with my head on a pike, sucked the
air right out of my lungs.

It was truly just another Salem. Different time and place. Same
characters with new names. Oh, no gallows or big oak tree this time.
But if they could they surely would. How far we have not come. I know,
I already said that but do you really understand what a tragedy it
means? The whole universe is ours if we want it but instead we must
gravel in the dirt having to debate the obvious.

I have been standing against injustice most of my life. It is my
nature. I am a child of the 60’s and proud of it. But what of my poor
family? They stood so proud and strong. They are tougher than I will
ever be. I had told them do not cry. Do not give these bastards any
satisfaction. I told my wife if I see you cry I will surely loose it.
I said it is in the Federal courts we will set things right and send
that wall higher than it has ever been. On the wall behind us was a
painting of the signing of the Declaration.

The judge handed the verdict to the clerk. The only sound was the
paper. The paper in the clerk’s hands with the hand written words that
spelled my doom, my family’s fate and the inevitable cheers from the
Christian mob.

With my guts in my throat and no air to breathe. The court clerk
read the decision of the jury.

We the jury find the defendant:

On the charge of Aggravated Assault and Battery:
Not Guilty!

On the charge of Assault and Battery:
Not Guilty!

On the charge of Assault:
Not Guilty!

On the charge of Battery:
Not Guilty!

Not a word, not a sound. The lynching had been cancelled. I took my
first free breath in almost two years. I looked at the jury and mouth
the words thank you. I gazed at the floor as floodgates opened, I
dared not move my head that others might see. Charley don’t cry, but
free air has its effects.

With all their praying, lies, crooked cops, warning that justice
better be done, packing the courthouse with their followers, Even a
teacher on the jury who had taught at the Hardesty School. (Our motion
to take her off the jury denied.) Not guilty was still the outcome.
The evidence was obvious. This was a bad case. And 12 men and women
had the guts.

From the start of this legal fight my lawyers said Atheism must be
kept out. That it was a no go in the Bible belt. I was just adamant
that Atheism be brought in. For it is the reason. It was the motive
for all the lies and hate. I felt it was about time that this dirty
little secret of hate, persecution, Christian madness and hypocrisy is
brought out into the light of day. When I told my lawyers this they
all gave me the same bewildered stare.

So one by one, I dropped one lawyer then two. Then I had a hard
time in finding another one. My third lawyer was still trying to
convince me to keep my atheism out even up till the day of the trial.
I still said no. Somewhere along the line I talk to the ACLU out of
San Francisco. Who let me know my first civil lawyer was not telling
me the whole story. I was advised by them and many others to complain
to the Bar about him.

You see he never told me that the prayer in itself is illegal. That
the schools in this area were not following the state and federal
funding guidelines. When I asked him after finding out from the ACLU.
He said yes it is against the law.

I told him I want to have it stopped. He told me he would not for
he was a Christian and he believed there should be school prayer. His
statement floored me for it bordered on madness. I said what you
believe and what you do for a client is two different things and that
you took an oath. He still refused.

It did not matter to him that I had already given him $10,000
dollars. He knows we are not rich. So I wrote a letter to him to
complain about his refusing to take my daughters civil case where it
should have gone from the start. And I asked for my money back. He
sent me a bill for another $5000 saying it was the charge for reading
my letter and wasting his time.

In my search for a civil attorney it became clear that no one would
touch this case. In all of Oklahoma I could not find an attorney. My
criminal attorney said he would look at it but only after I paid him
his $15000 for the criminal case. He sent me a letter that the funds
for the criminal were coming too slow and suggested that I seek other
counsel for the civil matter. But even after he got his $15000 he
would only take it if I paid him more. (Now that I have won the
criminal case he wants on the civil. Suffice to say he is off the
civil!)

Eventually I contacted the American Atheist, which was referred to
me by Edward Tabash, who was referred to me by a Mr. Robert Tierman. I
told them my problem in finding an attorney willing to take church and
state case in which the people are blatantly breaking the law. Yet no
one will take it. American Atheist, being out of another state, could
not refer me to anyone. But they said they would try to help. The ACLU
out of Oklahoma City refused. They sent me some standard letter. It
really hurt that I did not even rate a return call or a reason. I felt
betrayed, lost and confused.

Was this the United States? Where freedom reigns?

The whole family was under constant stress. Police trying to get
search warrants to the property by having ex-employees file false
statements. Other cops trying to hire ex-cons to beat me up. The whole
town knows of it! The Sheriff trying to have my bond pulled by the
bail bondsman when there was no legal way to do it. My kids have been
out of school since November. Principal’s son saying should he get a
gun when he sees my daughter and my son. DA has yet to reply to our
concerns. The Department of Human Services comes to my place saying
they received a complaint that I starve my kids. It was even obvious
to them the charge was bogus.

We have become very good at using back roads. The police follow us
around. Traffic tickets that when challenged were dropped in court.
Not to mention the stares and whispers, the betrayal from employees,
one of my healthy dogs dying. Brush fires starting up upwind.

An FBI agent even said, “You aren’t kidding”. When it was obvious
someone followed us and was watching our meeting out in the middle of
nowhere. I was told about a few things. All I can say is that some of
the crooks out here now charged with crimes wore badges and guns! But
he could not help my family and me. Not without witnesses willing to
come forward. One scared witness left the state. The last words she
spoke to me were, Chuck I don’t want to end up dead in a ditch!

Just what you would expect life to be like out here in the Bible
belt!

The roller coaster of emotions we went through every minute, every
day. It was truly a hell. There were days we spoke little. Other days
we spoke late into the night. You get to a point you become numb, but
it doesn’t last. For it is all aboard and you are on the roller
coaster again.

My poor family. They were standing tall. But they would not even be
in this place if it were not for me and my bright idea about
centralizing our business. We all missed the desert. The free open
Mojave Desert. My family did not ask for this. They deserved better. I
saw them all suffering.

Many a night I would sit in the barn alone with a pint of scotch
and look at the high beams and the rope on the wall.

Then out of the blue my wife received a call from Ellen Johnson who
said they had a lawyer that can help us, an Edwin Kagin who is their
legal director. Well I called him up, and our civil case is up and
running.

Edwin Kagin also by my request came to my criminal case for the two
cases are obviously interrelated. There were also other reasons.

Simply stated without Edwin Kagin, Ellen Johnson and American
Atheist I would be in jail now, or worse. Without them, we would have
no federal case on separation of church and state. The only group, the
only lawyer that would stand with my family and me to protect the wall
and not cringe at me wanting to put atheism as part of my defense.

In Edwin’s opening statement American Atheist magazine was shown.
The crowd almost rioted. He explained that Atheism was not a dirty
word and that it was a conclusion. That my family and I are not devil
worshippers. We just have no Gods. It was the basis of the case. It
was the danger. It was the truth. Yet the only lawyer to go there
freely was Edwin Kagin.

In a world where superstition is the norm and those who seek
another path are ridiculed or worse. Being an atheist takes guts.
Freedom is never freely given. The good fight is always there.

Oh you can hide yourself in the latest sitcom or have one or two
more scotch and waters but the good fight is still there. You can run
to your malls and buy yourself crazy with credit card frenzy. But the
good fight is still there. You can look away and deny allegiance. But
the good fight is still there. These are the times that try men’s
courage. You can debate till you’re blue in the face. It will not
change a damn thing.

Our forefathers are on our side in this fight. Trust me. From Adams
to Madison to Jefferson and Paine they all knew the dangers of a
Theocracy. They wrote the Constitution to assure it. And within the
federal courts we can protect this nation from a Theocracy.

The wall between the church and state must stand. But the wall is
being battered and cracks now appear. The Christians are at the gate
attempting to breach the wall and send us back down the road to an age
of darkness, bloodshed and fear. My family and myself are willing to
stand and fight the good fight. If we lose some skin, so be it. We
have no more else to give. We are financially done. Thanks to American
Atheist, Ellen Johnson and Edwin Kagin for the first time we do not
fight alone.

Please stand together with us and fight the good fight. The fight
that our forefathers began. Lets make the wall so high between Church
and State that they who wish to tear it down will know better and be
content with staying in their churches.

For freedom has never been free! There can be no freedom for all if
the wall does not stand.

The wall must stand.

Chuck, Nadia, Nicole, Czeslaw and Bridgette Smalkowski

Help Us Grow

Rock Island Argus
Wednesday, August 2, 2006

In his July 29 editorial “No president is above the constitution,” John Beydler makes an important point about the “signing statements” President Bush has added to his signature on over 800 bills: “They’ve all been blatantly unconstitutional.”

I agree, and support Republican Senator Arlen Spector, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in his call for judicial review of the president’s actions.

However, the damage this president is doing to our system of government cannot be adjudicated. Trust cannot be mandated by the Supreme Court.

When the President of the United States intentionally ignores the Constitution, the bedrock our democracy rests upon, the one thing that he swore to preserve, protect and defend, he is no better than the policeman who takes a bribe, or the teacher who abuses a student. Each has violated the public trust in our leaders, our institutions, our way of life.

May the United States, First Home of Democracy, survive this president’s systematic attempts to undermine the very foundation of our house.

Frank Mullen III
Aledo, IL

I write this while on the edge of sleep, so forgive me if I seem to ramble.

For quite a while I’ve been dwelling over the liberties that we’re losing. All sorts of things but most of all I find that political dissent these days has more of a chance of getting you locked up than it did just ten years ago. Back in the ’60’s people would be locked up for protesting against the government but the difference is that back then you would get a trial. We’ve seen now that you don’t even have to be a dissident to be locked up without trial or the expectation that you won’t be tortured. I have been thinking about this for a while but I’d just made a comment in Jim’s $5 Dollar Donation post saying that Abbie Hoffman would be proud and that sparked an urge to look him up on Wikipedia. I found a quote that went well with what I had been thinking about.

“You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.” ~ Abbie Hoffman

That made me think about the things I’ve heard and read about over the last few years. Conservatives saying that disagreeing with Bush is paramount to treason; people being interviewed by the Schutzstaffel…erm…I mean Secret Service (one SS is as good as the other) because of their bumper stickers or posters that are hanging in their private homes; blatant spying against American citizens, and now an anti-flag burning amendment.

If one uses Abbie Hoffman’s words as a guide, the United States is no longer a truly free country.

That said, I want to call attention to the actions of the Bush Administration during the past few years. At their height they were constantly screaming about how we were going to be attacked…any minute now. Every day they’d say that and shout “9/11!” and damn near every American would jump and stand in line giving the Bush Administration anything they wanted and doing it with a smile. And thinking about that and how they’re still using 9/11 for political vote whoring and still going on and on about how we’re about to be attacked by evil doers, it has brought me to the quote I shall leave everyone with.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” ~ Hermann Göring

Good night,
~Damen

Sometimes a lot can be said in just a few words. Reuters reports today in a two-paragraph story:

A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld the government’s authority to force high-speed Internet service providers to give law enforcement authorities access for surveillance purposes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down a petition aimed at overturning a decision by regulators requiring facilities-based broadband providers and those that offer Internet telephone service to comply with U.S. wiretap laws.

You read that right: the government can now require your broadband internet provider, or your internet telephone service, to spy on your activities. Even if you have broken no law, your behavior online may fall under the direct eye of government scrutiny.

It’s kind of like The Matrix, but without the kicky soundtrack or leather. And you’re not the plucky protagonist; you’re the exploited extra who gets offed as an innocent bystander in Scene 10.

Yesterday, the United States Senate joined the House of Representatives in voting for legislation that makes English the only official language of the United States of America, and authorizes the denial of government services to anyone, even American citizens, who do not speak English.

This is not just nationalism. It is hateful nationalism. It is nationalism fueled by ethnic-based hatred.

There is no real crisis in immigration. There is no real problem with people choosing what language they want to speak.

The real crisis is hatred. Our government is now encouraging a gigantic wave anti-Hispanic hatred. Watch out! When the truth about the war and about the programs to spy on us citizens gets too much for the government to handle, they come out with a new campaign of hate. Most Americans seem to be loving it.

Hispanics are the new scapegoats in George W. Bush’s War on Terror. We’re told to fear the Hispanics, to hate them for not surrendering their own culture to join ours, and so the Republicans, with some significant help from the Democrats, are now beginning to say that it is the Hispanics who are the real danger to America, and that if only it weren’t for the Hispanics here, speaking their dirty Spanish language, America could be great once again. So, they propose a series of measures to purge America of Hispanic influence, to make America ethically pure once again…

Does this not seem familiar to anybody here? Come on! The Hispanics are beginning to play the same role for our right wing government that the Jews played for the Nazis. The White House and Congress are making Hispanics the ethnic scapegoat, the group to blame for everything that goes wrong, and they must be purged, purged, purged…

We need to stop this anti-Hispanic campaign of hate!

America is descending into right wing nationalist fascism. Pay attention!

We have government spies used against us. We have the use of war as a political tool to create unity behind our leaders. We have the military being used within our borders for law enforcement. We have the special powers for corporations beloved in fascism. We have ethnic-based hatred, and the beginning of cultural purges. We have our own leaders telling us that we need to give up some of our freedoms for the sake of the Homeland.

Wake up, America! Can’t you see what’s happening?

This is history repeating itself. Don’t just watch it. Push back, damn it! Push back hard.

I recently posted an article on communism and socialism and one of the recent visitors to this website left a comment in that post.

In response to one of Comrade Stalin’s flippant remarks in which he has to say

Our Peoples Health care will make sure you could see a doctor Free.
(Of course doctors will receive a Government salary set by me, so
can’t say about quality).

This is another argument I always see against communism and by extension, universal healthcare. However what these people fail to see is that all it would take to ensure quality healthcare for everyone in the USA (yes, that includes you, Bill Gates), is to just take maybe five or ten percent from the military budget. A few billion here and there and everyone can have a decent level of healthcare. And, quite frankly, I think healthcare should be available to everyone, not just those who can afford it.

And now I foresee people screaming at me “If we reduce the military funding we won’t be able to stop the axis of evil!” Bullshit. We already spend more money on the military than the rest of the planet combined, so a few billion ain’t really gonna make much of a difference. Shit, if we cut the military spending by half we could solve all of our domestic problems and most of the problems of the rest of the world. But no, the Navy has to have their new Super Carriers, the Airforce has to get it’s next squadron of F-22s, the Marines just can’t survive without their XM8s and XM-29s and gods forbid the Army has to give up it’s next batch of Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters! Why, without these things, we can’t fight the evil doers! Want to see how utterly fucked up the military budget is? Take a look here.

You honestly telling me that without a fraction of that we can’t fight the evil doers and ensure a standard of medical care? Are you fucking insane?

Never mind that the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on a pointless war could have funded a fucking transatlantic tunnel from New York to England. For the price of the Iraq war, we could have had fucking quality healthcare, funding for cancer research, planned parenthood, AIDS research, as well as being able to feed all the starving children. Yes, I’m going to throw out the christian fundamental belly-achin’ when they see something they don’t like “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!?” Are these people really telling me that they would rather give the military bottomless funds in the exchange for the illusion of security (a huge advanced army didn’t stop some loons from flying themselves and civilians into those buildings, did it?) rather than give their kids the very real security of healthcare when they need it? When I see christian fundamentalists bitchin’ about homosexuality and sex in the media and start screaming WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN! yet remain silent when the proposal for universal medical care is shot down in congress I have to clench my teeth to keep from screaming at the ceiling because of these sexually repressed homophobes. According to these people, they’d rather let the children die of a preventable illness because they can’t afford the shot but god forbid these youngsters see a couple of dudes swapping saliva!

People say that universal medical care paid for by the government won’t be of the best quality, then tell me why fucking Cuba has a medical and education system that’s second to none? Why is it that most of the civilized world will provide healthcare to it’s citizens free of charge while the USA tells it’s citizens to go die in the gutter. Tell me why the USA has a oh-so-much better system than Cuba, the UK, Canada, etc, etc, etc. Tell me why it’s better to let insurance decide which life-saving treatments it will pay for but not others? Why is Viagra covered in insurance, but not abortion or heart transplants? Yeah, great system of ours. The best of quality in healthcare…but only if you can afford it, otherwise we just have to stabilize you, then boot you out and bill you $50 bucks for an aspirin.

Tell me all of that and tell me against why communism is so bad and capitalism is so great.

~ Damen

There are a few things I question about American ideals in general. Well, let’s not beat around the bush, there are a lot of things I question about American ideals. But one thing has always been at the top of my questions: Why do so many Americans hate communism?

Now I know the history about communism and socialism and I know about the two most notorious nations to claim these as their economic systems. Respectively Russia and Germany. And I can understand how the history of those two nations would give communism and socialism a bad name. But the more I’ve come to learn, the more I see a difference and how people mistake Communism with Stalinism. Communism in and of itself is, to the best of my understanding, an economic system in which the wealth is distributed evenly and the means of production is owned by the state and the nation becomes a classless society. Socialism is the economic system in which the means of production is controlled by the workers. I have to ask myself; what is so bad about that?

Around the 1950’s, a fella came into office by the name of Joseph McCarthy and he gained support by whipping up Americans into an anticommunist frenzy. He equated a communist with being a traitor. Doesn’t that go against the constitution and the intention of the founding fathers that you should be free to practice whatever political view you have as well as whatever religious view you have?

More to the point, I have to ask myself; what is so great about capitalism? We live in a capitalist nation (violently capitalist in my opinion) and what has it brought? A few individuals gain wealth at the expense of the masses. The majority of the population is left to struggle or else starve while 1% of the population lives in a mansion that can be as large as a city block and a property line that’ll stretch from here to the west coast. The vast minority of people living in this country get access to the finest medical care available while the majority are left without treatment and basically left to die; gods forbid they need a surgery like a heart transplant. Those upper crust people also have the money to be able to buy votes from politicians to keep the minimum wage from being raised, then reward them with nice jobs once they’re out of office. The CEO of an oil company gets 400 billion dollars in a retirement package while the average guy gets…AARP. Yeah, that’s real equal. To me, the system of capitalism is little more than a modern usage of the ancient European ideas of nobility. The lords of the land (the wealthy 1%) make money from the peasantry (the other 99%) while doing almost none of the work. The only difference here is that the lords have no obligation to protect their peasants. In fact, come war time, they’ll do whatever it takes to keep from fighting.

I look at the examples of communism and I see a much better way of thinking. A classless society, medical care for everyone, a living wage, a standard of living, education for the poor and so forth.

But what gets me is why, why do so many Americans hate communism? What has given them these anticommunist ideals? Why didn’t Americans rally in the streets after Bush turned down Castro’s offer of 1,500 doctors after Katrina? If communism is so bad, why has Venezuela offered us oil so cheaply after the ecological disasters of the last two years?

People tell me “The USSR broke up and Cuba’s citizens are starving; that’s proof that communism doesn’t work” but to me it’s just proof that communism would work if the most powerful nation on the planet wouldn’t refuse trade with anyone who does business with a communist country.

I write this and I’m not sure if I’ll be investigated by the Department of Homeland Insecurity. Has the McCarthyism of the ’50’s and ’60’s died down enough for me to speak freely about counter-capitalist ideals? I strongly doubt it, but I feel I should use my right to free speech and voice my opinion even if it does go against the status-quo. Isn’t that the essence of liberty? Isn’t that the ideals enshrined in the constitution? Is it really treason for people to search for a better way of life if they keep getting screwed by the current system?

There have been many conservatives and republicans who will, after hearing me voice my liberal opinions, call me a commie. Well shit, if wanting progressive change in the government; wanting the government to ensure a living wage; and feeling that everyone has a right to medical care and education rather than just those who can afford it and let the rest die then yeah, I guess I am a pinko leftist commie. If that’s what being a commie means then I’m as red as a fucking traffic light.

I guess I should sum this up. I don’t understand why so many people hate communism after looking around at what has become of a capitalist country.

For those of you who have been following the discussion in the post I made earlier entitled Bob Smith and the Tree Huggers, you’ll note that USMarine has recently stated that the USA was founded for god and also basically told me to leave the country if I didn’t believe in said god.

Damen,

First off if you dont belive in God, why dont you get out of the country that was founded for him, your contridicting your own ideals, obviously you do belive in him why else would you live in America, hmmm how does it go ” I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to The Republic for which it stands, ONE NATION UNDER GOD, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Yes, that’s all well and good but when you look at history without a handy-dandy set of Bible-Noculars in front of your eyes you’ll see things quite differently.

I have already said this before but it bears repeating because I fear that our good friend USMarine will skip over what I said a second time.

For those who may think USMarine is right and the USA is somehow founded for god I want you all to take a moment to direct your attention to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

Amendment I

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.

Seems kinda cut and dry there. No religion in the government. Kinda hard to miss, what with it being in the first sentence and all. But apparently USMarine missed it, or he just didn’t really know what it meant. Well, that’s fine, but then he went on to say to Jim

Jim,

Sir, how is that claiming superiority over anyone, I am stating that it would be contridictory to say I dont belive in shoes but yet still wear them every day kinda get where im coming from?, no sir they are the ones that need to “own what they say” if you dont belive this country was founded for God then you dont know history or the pledge of allegiance. nor should you live here.

Now this is a shocker to me. USMarine wants to talk about knowing history? Okay, let’s just take a look at history and see if he’s right, shall we?

In the Treaty of Tripoli (which was signed by John Adams) it states in Article 11:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

There it is, a little something from history which states that the United States is not founded on the christian religion. So one must ask how, if the USA is not founded on the christian religion, can it be founded for the christian god? The answer here is, it’s not.

USMarine also uses the Pledge of Allegiance to justify his stance because it has “Under God” in it. Well, he wants to tell us to look at history? He should look at it first because the Pledge of Allegiance did not have Under God in it when it was adopted in 1892.

A quick search on Wikipedia.org will show you what I mean, but I’ll just save you the time.

Addition of the words “Under God”

Docherty’s message began with a comparison of the United States to ancient Sparta. Docherty noted that a traveler to ancient Sparta was amazed by the fact that the Spartans’ national might was not to be found in their walls, their shields, or their weapons, but in their spirit. Likewise, said Docherty, the might of the United States should not be thought of as emanating from their newly developed Atomic weapons, but in their spirit, the “American way of life.” In the remainder of the sermon Docherty sought to define as succinctly as possible the essence of the American spirit and way of life. To do so, Docherty appealed to those two words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. According to Docherty, what has made the United States both unique and strong was her sense of being the nation that Lincoln described: a nation “under God.” He took the opportunity to tell a story of a conversation with his children about the Pledge of Allegiance. Docherty was troubled by the fact that it did not include any reference to the deity. Without such reference, Docherty insisted that the Pledge could apply to just about any nation. He felt that the pledge should reflect the American spirit and way of life as defined by Lincoln.

After the service concluded, Rev. Docherty had opportunity to converse with President Eisenhower about the substance of the sermon. The President expressed his enthusiastic concurrence with Docherty’s view, and the very next day, Eisenhower had the wheels turning in Congress to incorporate Docherty’s suggestion into law. On February 8, 1954, Representative Charles Oakman (R-Mich), introduced a bill to that effect.

Senator Homer Ferguson, in his report to the Congress, March 10, 1954, said that “the introduction of this joint resolution was suggested to me by a sermon given recently by the Rev. George M. Docherty, of Washington, D.C., who is pastor of the church at which Lincoln worshipped.” This time Congress concurred with the Oakman-Ferguson resolution, and Eisenhower opted to sign the bill into law appropriately on Flag Day (June 14, 1954).

A little history lesson and you’ll find that until 1954 the words “Under God” were never mentioned.

What many people fail to remember is that despite what the Founding Fathers may have believed in, whether they were religious or not, they set up a secular government, one of the first in history, and they did it because they knew what happens when you mix religion into the government. When religion is allowed to take part in the proceedings of the government, it will open the door to tyranny. But I think I can do better to quote one of the wiser men of our nation.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. ~Thomas Jefferson

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. ~Thomas Jefferson

~Damen

One of my favorite columnists, Dennis Rogers, hits it out of the park again with a few short paragraphs on prayer in school and the political sphere:

Call me cynical, but I suspect many politicians publicly pray so people (read, voters) will be impressed with how saintly they are. Either that or they think God is hard of hearing.

Wouldn’t a silent and sincere prayer from the heart cut through the heavenly chatter faster than a mini-sermon from some long-winded politician unable to keep quiet in the presence of a captive audience?

The courts agree the Constitution allows prayer at governmental meetings so long as the praying stops short of preaching. It’s when officials promote one religion over others that they get in trouble.

How ironic the American Civil Liberties Union chose Holy Week to gently remind the Chatham County Board of Commissioners that ending its opening prayers with some variation of “in Jesus’ name” promotes Christianity and is a no-no.

Prayers are allowed at public meetings, the ACLU said, but Chatham’s elected officials have crossed the constitutional line separating the business of man from the business of God.

Politicians may bluster, but they really love such controversy. They get to pose as stalwart defenders of truth, justice the American way and God, too. As if God needed their help.

There’s never been a clearer example of what such blowhards are up to than the recurring prayer-in-school spat.

Kids quietly pray in school all the time. Teachers, principals, secretaries, janitors, school bus drivers and lunch ladies quietly pray in school, too. As one wag put it, as long as there are algebra tests, there will be prayer in schools. Amen.

The catch is, you can’t force others to take part in your prayer, which is exactly what happens when you pray out loud in front of a class, a meeting or the big game on Friday night.

Want to pray in school or at work or before a session of the county zoning board? Fine. Close your eyes, bow your head and silently pray away. No one will hassle you. Ask for world peace, a date to the prom, a pay raise or that the world ends before next Friday’s geometry exam. Or just say “thank you.”

Our freedom of faith was bought and paid for by brave men and women fighting on battlefields and in courtrooms. But that’s apparently not good enough for some folks.

So to Bible-thumping politicians who feel their brand of religion trumps the freedoms for which so many have died, I offer this bit of sage advice:

Testifying at a Senate hearing last month, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, said, “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

Pray over that, politicians.

Just do it quietly.