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Republican “Morality” is at work.

The State of Florida, controlled by Republican fundamentalists, has used its big government power to decide that a 13-year old girl, although she has clearly, repeatedly and cogently expressed her wish to have an abortion, cannot. Why? Because, regardless of what she thinks is best for her, the Republican-controlled state has decided it knows better. Read on:

“Why can’t I make my own decision?” That was the blunt question to a judge from a pregnant 13-year-old girl ensnared in a Palm Beach County court fight over whether she can have an abortion. “I don’t know,” Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez replied, according to a recording of the closed hearing obtained Friday. “You don’t know?” replied the girl, who is a ward of the state. “Aren’t you the judge?” Against a backdrop of state and federal efforts to pass a parental notification law for teen abortions, the exchange was typical of L.G.’s pluck as she argued that she had the right and capability to make her own decision… “I think if I want to make the decision, it’s my business and I can do that,” she told the judge. The DCF is the teen’s legal guardian after she was taken away from her parents for abuse or neglect. State law allows minors to have abortions without notifying their guardians. Experts say the law extends to wards of the state, raising the question of why this girl’s decision has ended up before a judge… L.G., who told Alvarez she had run away at least five times from her youth shelter, maintained, “It would make no sense to have the baby.” “I don’t think I should have the baby because I’m 13, I’m in a shelter and I can’t get a job,” the girl said as Alvarez and her guardian ad litem, assigned to shepherd her in the legal system, questioned her… She also questioned the health risk of carrying the fetus to term. “Since you guys are supposedly here for the best interest of me, then wouldn’t you all look at that fact that it’d be more dangerous for me to have the baby than to have an abortion?” she asked. Alvarez called that “a good point.”

The Republicans, through their legislative and executive actions, have made it clear they want to tell you who you can and can’t love, what sexual positions you can and cannot use when you’re in your bedroom, what sort of medical treatments you can and cannot get, what books you can read, and even what you can and can’t do with your own body.

Republican “morality,” in short, is the imposition of government theocrats’ decisions on your own private life. Republican “freedom” is government theocrats’ freedom to shove their own parochial standards down your throat.

This is your future if you continue to vote Republican.

Ninety-three days after President George W. Bush promised that he would release a complete, detailed plan for changing American workers’ Social Security benefits, he finally offered an incomplete portion his Social Security plan last night.

Here’s what President Bush went on national television to announce:

Under Bush’s plan, most Americans will suffer Social Security cuts. Millions upon millions of old people, families with a parent that dies, and people who are victims of devastating injuries and illness will have to make due with less. Bush calls this “progress”.

Bush also says its financially necessary to take money away from old people, widows, orphaned children and people with severe disabilities.

Why, oh why, is that financially necessary? Well, Bush has to find some way to pay for his plan to funnel money out of the Social Security Trust Fund and into the coffers of Wall Street financial firms - the same financial firms that cheated investors out of incomprehensible amounts of money in the Enron school of fraud and mutual fund manipulation scandals.

Bush also has to pay for his repeal of the law that asked children who received multi-million dollar inheritances from wealthy parents to contribute a small portion that money that they did not lift a finger to earn, and give to the public good.

So, in effect, Bush announced last night that he intends to tax your Social Security in order to set up special financial programs to benefit corrupt Wall Street investment firms and create special tax shelters for rich kids’ trust funds.

For the record, there is good reason to suspect that diverting money from the Social Security Trust Fund into the coffers of Wall Street firms will actually further reduce American workers’ Social Security benefits - on top of the reductions Bush proposes.

When he retired, a San Diego defense analyst calculated the increase of the money he had contributed to the Social Security Trust Fund, and compared it to the increase that money would have grown if invested in the Dow Jones index fund instead.

Social Security’s performance: $261,372
The Dow Jones performance: $248,166

This much is for sure: George W. Bush’s Social Security Scheme will get big amounts of money to some people, but those people do NOT include America’s working families.

I know that it’s not fashionable in America these days to say anything nice about the French. Republican web sites are still promoting bumper stickers that advocate the bombing of France by the American military, as a matter of fact.

However, it’s a simple matter of history that the American people owe a large debt of gratitude to the people of France. It is, after all, the French who presented the Statue of Liberty to the American people as a gift. Even though (and perhaps especially because) George W. Bush has used the War of Terror as a pretext to refuse Americans the right to enter the famous landmark, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of how people can work across international borders, and even across oceans, in the name of liberty.

Our debt to France goes back further than that, however. Who could forget the way that the Marquis De Lafayette came to the American colonies to support our fight for independence? Well, apparently, the Republicans can, but that’s not the point. The point is that the French helped us Americans gain our very nationhood, not to mention our liberty.

So, at this time when so many Republicans are busy threatening attacks on the French, and executing attacks on the liberty guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment to the Constitution, I think that it’s appropriate to reflect back in history upon the words of the Marquis De Lafayette himself, and what he had to say about America and its liberty. The words of the Marquis:

“If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.”

As of today, 61 members of the House of Representatives support H.R. 952, which is written simply and exactly to end the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, in which people are sent abroad to be tortured. That’s two more members of Congress who have added their support over the past week. Thanks go out to these two members of the House of Representatives who saw the light of reason, took a deep breath, and added their names to the list of those supporting the bill:

Rep. James Moran (D-VA)
Rep. David Price (D-NC)

I’m gratified to see my own representative, David Price, finally getting on board the Perfectly-Reasonable-and-Strikingly-Obvious-Morality Train. It’s great that we have 14% of the United States House of Representatives taking a stand against torture. But what has happened to this country to explain that only 14% of the United States House of Representatives stands against torture? What explains the fact that not one Republican has taken this stand against torture — not just in speeches, but in policy action, where it counts? What happened to those moral values everyone was talking about a few months ago? Most members of the House just aren’t budging on this, and that’s simply unconscionable.

Click here for a complete list of who’s supporting H.R. 952 and who’s still soft on torture. Contact the softies and tell them to get on board. Then spread the word so that your friends, family, neighbors and coworkers know about this underreported issue and know what to do to make a positive change.

I’ve been thinking of sayings about Tom DeLay that would fit on a shirt today, idly, while taking my kids to the NC Zoological Park in Asheboro. Two that tickled me, Elmo:

Tom DeLay took a trip to Russia, a jaunt to the theatre and a luxury skybox from a fatcat lobbyist, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

If a dollar fell in the forest, would Tom DeLay pick it up before you heard the sound?

How do YOU sum up such a Byzantine mess?

Ninety-One days ago, George W. Bush promised to the nation that he would offer a detailed proposal explaining specifically how he would alter the current social security system.

Ninety-One days later, George W. Bush has failed to offer such a detailed proposal.

If this is so important, why can’t George W. Bush even manage to live up to his own promises and make a specific proposal?

That’s a real question, with oh-so-many possible answers.

It’s imperative, if you want to understand what’s behind the latest fundamentalist religious push in America, to watch what fundamentalists DO, not primarily what they say.

A case in point, with a tip of the pen to Max Blumenthal in the April 26 edition of The Nation:

Tony Perkins, president of the powerful fundamentalist religious Family Research Council, paid David Duke — you know, white hooded robes, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, White Youth Alliance, National Association for the Advancement of White People, Republican Legislator — $82,000 for his mailing list.

It seems this fundamentalist religious leader knows exactly who butters his bread.

“The campaign in Iraq illustrates the continuing progress of military technology and tactics, but if there is a single overriding lesson it must be this: American military power, especially when buttressed by Britain’s, is virtually unchallengeable today.

Take us on? Don’t try! And that’s not hubris, it’s just plain fact.”

- Wesley Clark, April 11 2003, London Times

[Update: in the comments section for this post, a miffed Clark supporter alleges that this is a Matt Drudge-style fabrication and that Clark never wrote any such thing. Of course, that’s wrong. Click through to the comments to read the entire op-ed piece from which this quote was taken.]

How is George W. Bush’s strategy for Winning the War On Terror going? You know, the one that involves invading countries, stoking fear, giving the terrorists public acknowledgment, thereby magnifying their power?

Oh, well, serious terrorist attacks jumped threefold last year. Kind of an operational definition of not working.

So how does the Bush administration deal with this sort of discouraging news? It decides not to share it with the public anymore. That’s classic Republicanism at work. Nixon would be proud.

Believe it or not, forces are in motion spreading the word about the 2008 elections. John Kerry may have receded for now into the political shadows, but you can bet your boots that the bureaucrats in the Democratic Party are already jockeying with each other to make room for their favored candidates on the next presidential ticket.

As citizens, we can either wait for the Democratic party apparatus to figure out who should run for president, or we can take some responsibility for that process ourselves. If there’s a political figure you strongly admire who has what it takes to be in the White House, now is the perfect time to get the word out.

With that in mind, we’ve opened up our newly expanded shop, dedicated solely to bumper stickers, buttons, shirts and more promoting various 2008 presidential contenders. As of now, we’ve got messages supporting the candidacies of:

If you support one of these contenders, then by all means get the word out. But that doesn’t happen by bumper sticker alone. Who do you support as a 2008 presidential candidate? And why?

Make the case. We’re all ears.

OK, I’ll pray.

Sweet Baby Jesus, it’s been four long years since the Congressional Progressive Caucus added an update to its “Daily Updates.”

Dear Lord, will you grant an errant atheist a favor? Will you slap CPC “Chair” Lynn Woolsey upside the head, just for me?

Mother Davis turns off her calculator and sighs as she comments,

Consumer confidence reports came out today, and for the third month in a row, consumer confidence has slipped down. Yet, President Bush and the Republicans continue to say that everything is going just great with the economy. What do average American consumers know that President Bush doesn’t know?

Well, for one thing, average Americans know what it feels like to work for your whole life and never get one tenth of the rewards of a rich guy who is still living off a trust fund from his daddy well into his middle age. Average Americans know what it means that the price of fuel has more than tripled in the last four years. They know what inflation really means, because they have to work for every dollar they spend.

Average Americans know what it’s like to work your whole life, and to feel that work pile up on you like a load of bricks as you get older, and to watch, as your body slows down, that your life’s savings are slipping away. They know what it’s like to see some guy who was born rich tell them about the “ownership society”, telling them to invest everything in the stock market, only to see the stock market go down just when they really need the money - maybe for an operation that their expensive health insurance plan just doesn’t cover any more. President Bush doesn’t know jack about how that feels. So, I guess it’s easy for him to feel confident.

The rest of us take a look at the investments we’ve made, and watch them stagnate. We watch the stock market go down, and cringe, because that means that we’ll have to put off retirement for another year. We watch prices go up over and over again, even as our wages remain flat.

And so, as the President makes more promises about how eliminating taxes for people who are born rich is going to help the economy, and tells us more stories about how giving billions of dollars away to big corporations is going to make a boom in the economy, and tells us once more how deficits don’t matter, even though we’re going to be writing checks to pay off the interest for years after he retires before the age of 65, we now have to listen as the President uses public money to hold Republicans-only rallies to build support for the idea of cutting back on Social Security.

You’ll forgive us, Mr. President, if our confidence is slipping. For us, the economy is not just a game. As your advisors make pretty charts for you, with arrows all pointed down, you may be worried about re-election for Republicans, but we’re worried about a more important agenda. That’s our future slipping away.

wondering how many times a monkey can slip on the same peel,
Mother Davis

In the footsteps of J. Matthew’s excellent analysis of a four step plan to establish theocracy in the United States, I wish to offer a small piece of historical perspective from the early days of our nation.

Fundamentalists like Senator Bill Frist smell secular blood in the water, and are extremely eager to please the Religious Right’s desire to redefine what it means to be a traditional American. America’s regressive fundamentalists are fond of falsifying American history, claiming that the United States of America is a Christian nation, although our Constitution and laws clearly demonstrate that the United States of America is a secular nation, established with the idea that religion should remain private.

In truth, the fundamentalists of the Republican Party are seeking to go much further back in history than the founding of the United States of America. They seek to take America back to the Dark Ages from which the earliest European Americans fled. They want to take us back to the days of the Salem Witch Trials. When else, but in the dark colonial days of America, was there theocratic oppression of citizens of the kind that the Frist fringe seeks to install now?

It is a well established historical fact that many of the most prominent of America’s founding fathers were openly distrustful of religious claims of authority. I’ll provide one example today - an example that is not nearly as well known as it ought to be. It’s from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote:

“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 blind-folded fear.”

What would Jefferson say now, upon seeing the Republican Party’s attempts to destroy the separation of Church and State, and replace it with government programs based on nothing but faith?