Remember when George W. Bush promised to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq? I don’t think Bush even makes that promise anymore. He just claims that he’s going to try to leave Iraq with stable internal security - whether it’s the brutal sort last seen under Saddam Hussein or not.

In any case, if any remaining idealists did want to continue the war in order to liberate the Iraqis, you’ve got to wonder what their reaction would be to today’s news from Iraq: The Bush Administration has been using American taxpayers’ money to bribe Iraqi journalists to write positive stories about the American occupation. That’s right - you work hard every day so that a portion of your paycheck can go to pay Iraqis to write fake good news for George W. Bush to brag about.

So, you know how Bush is always saying that Americans don’t realize how well things are going in Iraq because we just can’t hear all the good news that Iraqis are always talking about in their new “free press”? Well, it turns out that what Bush said is not exactly true. The truth of the matter is that Americans don’t talk about how well things are going in Iraq because we’re not yet all on Bush’s payoff list.

Of course, some Americans, like pseudojournalists Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and Michael McManus, have already been bribed. But come on now, don’t you deserve to be among their number? How come they get the big bucks for saying good things about the Bush Administration, but you don’t?

Demand to be part of the new Republican system of paid partisan hackery. Call the Republican National Committee at 202-863-8790 and insist that they cut you in on the action. Heck, at the rate that the Bush Republicans are spending, every American deserves at least 250 dollars in return for pretending that the Iraq War is going swimmingly.

Mother Davis puts on her sneaky shoes as she tracks Right Wing Roberts and his little pal Scalito, commenting,

Judge Samuel Alito has not even had a day of confirmation hearings, but already his legal path has joined with the path of John Roberts in a confluence of right wing plans that threatens to wash the foundations right from under Americans’ right to privacy.

Today, John Roberts presided over testimony in a Supreme Court case about whether it is constitutional for a state to require doctors to consult a judge before performing an emergency abortion on a teenage girl, even if the teenage girl’s health is in immediate and serious danger. One of the arguments that abortion rights supporters have made about such requirements is that they are part of a larger attempt to undermine the legal foundations that made Roe v. Wade possible.

Right wing legal experts never directly address such charges, and today we learned why: It’s because the charges are true.

There really is a right wing conspiracy to undermine the legal foundations of the Roe v. Wade decision, and Judge Samuel Alito appears to be smack in the center of that conspiracy. It seems that, among documents from Alito’s work for the Reagan Administration that have just been released by the National Archives, there is a memo in which Samuel Alito wrote that that state regulations restricting but not fully outlawing abortion could be an essential part of an overarching agenda to build up the necessary legal precedent to overturn Roe v. Wade, the case that made it illegal for states to make abortion a crime.

In his memo, Alito wrote the following rhetorical question: “What can be made of this opportunity to advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects?” Oh, what indeed.

In spite of what Republicans say, this memo shows that Alito is the perfect example of a right wing judge who believes in the power of judges to legislate from the bench - so long as it’s in the interests of right wing Republicans. Alito saw a court case about abortion not as a dispute upon which to apply an objective interpretion of the law. Alito saw abortion cases as opportunities to promote a partisan political agenda.

It was about 20 years ago that Alito wrote that memo, and in the meantime, he’s been working to promote the exact kind of court cases he described in his Reagan Administration memo. Alito’s partisan crusade in the courts has never ended, and that case heard before the Supreme Court today is a part of his plan, a larger right wing plan to manipulate the Supreme Court into allowing abortion to be completely banned.

Given the contents of the memo revealed today, there is no way that Judge Alito could be appropriately confirmed to the Supreme Court. If Alito were to serve as a member of the Supreme Court, he would have to recuse himself on all cases related in any way to abortion and the right to privacy. After all, Alito is now documented as proposing the use of such court cases as political fodder in his campaign to impose his beliefs on all Americans.

If Samuel Alito wants to swagger around with that kind of crass attitude, let him campaign for a seat on his state’s legislature, where partisan maneuvering is appropriate. Judge Alito has no business, however, carrying out his partisan plans in the United States Supreme Court. America deserves better than that.

Setting off a fire alarm at Judge Alito’s doorstep,
Mother Davis

It’s time now for our the third Irregular Times podcast, as the elections for the 2006 congressional season heat up. This particular podcast focuses on the congressional races that are lining up for New York State in 2006. The first half covers the race between Senator Hillary Clinton and a rival progressive Democrat, Steve Greenfield. The second half covers the races in New York’s 24th, 25th, and 20th districts, with focus on the campaigns of Democrat Paloma Capanna against incumbent James Walsh and the mysterious lack of information about the campaign of Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand against incumbent Republican James Sweeney.

You can subscribe to our podcasts and listen to them on your iPod or other MP3 player by adding our Podcast newsfeed to your subscription list.

Or, you can listen to just this particular podcast by clicking here.

This morning, the news was full of the announcement of a letter that senator Hillary Clinton sent out to her New York State constituents saying “I take responsibility for my vote” - the vote Hillary Clinton made in favor of giving George W. Bush the power to start a war in Iraq.

Yet, in the same letter, Senator Clinton refuses to admit that that vote was a mistake, and that she was wrong to support the war from the start. How is that taking responsibility? The answer, of course, is that Senator Hillary Clinton is not taking any real responsibility for her role in starting the war in Iraq. Saying the words “I take responsibility” is not the same thing as actually taking responsibility. When we hear Hillary Clinton saying “I take responsibility”, we should remember when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said “I take responsibility” for the torture occuring at Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld never was punished, or even thoroughly investigated, for his role in that torture. He evaded responsibility, just as Hillary Clinton continues to evade responsibility for voting to approve Bush’s plan for a war in Iraq.

Let’s all think back to the early autumn of 2002, when the congressional vote for war powers in Iraq took place. We all knew what that vote was, and we all knew that there was no credible evidence yet that Iraq posed any kind of significant threat to the United States or to any other nations at all. The plain fact is that, just before Hillary Clinton made the vote for war, the CIA gave her and all the other members of Congress a report that assessed the threat of an attack by Iraq against the United States as “extremely low”.

Principled, decent political leaders voted against approving the Iraq War in 2002. In doing so, they warned the American people that there was no evidence justifying an invasion and occupation of Iraq. A majority of residents of New York State, and a large majority of New York Democrats, opposed going to war at the time. Tens of thousands of people like myself called and wrote to Hillary Clinton begging her not to make the vote in favor of going to war.

Senator Hillary Clinton did not listen to her constituents. She did not heed the disturbing lack of evidence for a reason to go to war. She was wrong.

As a matter of fact, Hillary Clinton is still wrong about Iraq. Just consider what she wrote in that letter sent out this morning. On the one hand, Clinton says that America has to “finish what we started” in Iraq. But elsewhere in the letter, Clinton writes that “it is time for the president to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war,” and says that she expects “the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war”.

Huh? How can anybody seriously suggest that we “finish what we started” while saying that there never was a good plan for what we started, and that what we started was based on mismanagement and lies? How the hell are we supposed to finish what we started, when we don’t even know what it is that we started?

It is indeed the time for President Bush to stop serving up platitudes about the complete disaster of the Iraq War, but the same is true of Senator Clinton. Just a couple weeks ago, Senator Clinton’s husband, ex-President Clinton, said flat out that the United States made “a big mistake” when it started the Iraq War. So, why can’t Senator Clinton admit the same thing, and acknowledge that her vote was a part of making the mistake?

If Hillary Clinton really wants to take responsibility for her vote for war in Iraq back in 2002, then just saying “I take responsibility” is not enough. Here’s what Hillary Clinton needs to do to take real responsibility:
1) Write a letter of apology to me and to all the other people who contacted her in the weeks before her vote for war, pleading with her to vote against the war powers
2) Make a public, televised speech apologizing for her vote to all the people of New York State and the citizens of the United States
3) Admit that she was wrong to make the vote giving Bush war powers
4) Pledge never to approve of an effort to take America to war on such flimsy evidence ever again
5) Put her support behind the effort to end the war responsibly and as soon as possible, with reparations to Iraq
6) Vigorously promote an independent investigation into all the abuses of power by the federal government related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq

Senator Clinton, the six points above are a clear recipe for taking real responsibility. Now, it’s up to you. Are you willing to serve it up, or are you going to slink back behind all your excuses again?

I will take this opportunity to point out that there is a solidly anti-war alternative Democratic candidate for Senate in 2006 - Steve Greenfield. Hillary Clinton cannot take our support for re-election in 2006 for granted any longer. Nor can she assume the support of anti-war Democrats for her campaign for President in 2008. Clinton needs to earn the support of the anti-war Democratic base, and she has an awful lot of mistakes to make up for.

Try again, Senator Clinton. This time, with feeling.

Biblical archaeology is a booming field, which is strange, given the poverty of its findings. Teams of people dedicated to proving that the Old Testament of the Bible is literally true comb the Near East looking for signs of the old Bible stories, always on the verge of finding something really big that justifies continued investment from Christian churches, yet actually coming up with little more than hoaxes, ordinary artifacts, or just plain dirt.

Then again, once in a while, biblical archaeologists actually find something that is related to a story in the Bible - through six degrees of separation.

So it is this week that Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University in Israel announced that he had found evidence linked with the philistine warrior Goliath. Well, kind of. What he found was a tiny potsherd that had two scribbles on it: “alwt” and “wlt”, in proto-Canaanite script. Maeir interprets these scribbles as Indo-European names. These names, then, he proposes, might be similar to other Indo-European names, and the name Goliath might, in turn, be linguistically related to those names.

So, what we’ve got is a little piece of pottery with scribbles that might be names related to names that are related to the name Goliath, but maybe not the Goliath in the Bible, but just some other guy named Goliath.

How then, is this find being reported in the news? You guessed it: It’s being heralded as possible proof that the Biblical character Goliath really existed. Take, for example, this headline from the Purdue Exponent: Pottery Shard May Refer to Biblical Tale. The first line in the article continues, “An inscription on a pottery fragment found in Israel lends credence to the Biblical story around David and Goliath.”

How? How? How does a little sherd with some letters that might be names related to other names that could be related the name Goliath lend “credence to the Biblical story around David and Goliath”?

This is like, if we weren’t sure that George Washington really existed, and there was no proof of it except for some very very old folktales about such a man, someone found an old scrap of paper with a scribble reading “Gurg Wast”. Maybe it’s the writing on a non-English speaker trying to write about George Washington. Maybe it’s a scribble. Maybe it refers to a digestive complaint. It certainly does nothing on its own to lend credence to the existence of George Washington.

Professor Laurence Mykytiuk is quoted in the Purdue article as saying that the sherd “does provide information about Philistine culture that corresponds to the information conveyed in the Biblical account,” and that “The discovery provides well-grounded cultural background that supports the Biblical narrative. It makes you think about whether or not other things in the Bible may be true.”

Cultural background? Cultural background?!? What kind of cultural background does a sherd with a few scribbled letters on it provide? One: People made pottery back then. Two: The people who made pottery could write. Nothing else.

Professor Mykytiuk ought to know better than to play along with this ridiculous effort to provide justification for literal belief in Bible stories. His link to the Bible’s Goliath stretches the sherd so thin that it could sail away up into the sky on a gentle breeze. That people’s faith is held aloft on such wisps speaks poorly of the desperation for belief in compelling stories. Such eager grasping of flimsy evidence is a poor mental habit that leads toward a pervasive gullibility in our country - a gullibility that is easily taken advantage of by unscrupulous leaders.

Four days ago, I shared information about which possible Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2008 have garnered the greatest number of orders for bumper stickers, buttons or shirts endorsing them. Measuring sales of these items is useful, since it captures the strong feelings of those willing to make a public commitment to one candidate in particular.

If we look at the number of states in which a particular candidate generates the most sales, we get the following picture of who’s out in front in the early race:

Hillary Clinton: 30 states
Barack Obama: 9 states
Joseph Biden: 5 states
(no other contenders received the most sales in more than one state)

However, it occurs to me that it’s much more important at this point in the game to be one of the top attention-getters in a state than it is to be the first-place attention-getter in a state. A second-place showing in Mississippi by Barack Obama behind Hillary Clinton is important, since it indicates that these two candidates are perceived to be the alternatives there. That means that if Hillary Clinton stumbles or decides not to run, Obama stands poised to most easily gain victory in Mississippi.

With this in mind, I went back to the data and, state-by-state, looked at who achieved first, second or third place in a state when it came to bumper sticker, button, or shirt sales. Looking at those who got the gold, silver or bronze in at least one state, we get this slightly different picture of those running at the front of the pack:

Hillary Clinton: 44 states
Barack Obama: 29 states
Joseph Biden: 11 states
Barbara Boxer: 7 states
John Kerry: 4 states
John Edwards: 4 states
Russ Feingold: 3 states
Wesley Clark: 3 states
Bill Richardson: 2 states
Evan Bayh: 2 states

These results have a higher resolution, indicating that the primary race for the top spot in the hearts and minds of pro-Democrat Americans is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who is contender for popular leadership in well more than half the states. Joseph Biden is a more distant but respectable third, and although Barbara Boxer wasn’t the most popular in any one state, she was one of the three most popular contenders in seven states, indicating room for a more serious (albeit difficult) run if she so decided.

It is interesting to me that Evan Bayh, Bill Richardson and Wesley Clark are considered “serious contenders” more than Barack Obama or Barbara Boxer. What makes them more serious given their anemic popularity? Institutional connections? Share your thoughts on this — I’d like to hear them.

Snoop around long enough, and you’ll find a connection between all of the nefarious acts being carried out by the Republican government in Washington D.C. I admit it, I actually exclaimed, “Holy Gee Willikers!” when I saw just what company would be carrying out the spying operations against ordinary Americans under contract with the CIFA, the military intelligence agency that will soon be given the power by the Bush Administration to scour commercial records for details about your private life - in the style of Total Information Awareness.

It’s MZM, Inc. Yes, that’s right, the very same MZM, Inc. that has just been caught giving huge bribes to Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham - and suspiciously large gifts to Representatives Katherine and Virgil Goode as well.

So, folks, it’s not just an issue that the Bush Republicans are arranging for the military agency, CIFA, to gather records about all your private, legal, activities. They’re also hiring a firm infamous for serious corruption to do it. Just consider - if you were to pick any company to spy on Americans’ private lives, what would be the last company you’d choose? I know the last company I would choose is one that had been caught bribing members of Congress. Well, maybe Halliburton would be tied for last place.

Who would have thought that the whole Tom DeLay - Jack Abramoff corruption scandal would have found its way back to the insanity of the Total Information Awareness program?

I’ve looked myself at the unclassified government record that documents the use of MZM, Inc. in the plan to gather information about law-abiding citizens by the CIFA, and, for the record, here are the other companies involved in the plot:

DoD Data Analysis and Engineering Contract, Harris Technical Services Corporation, Alexandria, VA, provides analysis of all source data and provides system design support to the data analysis function.
• Gray Hawk Systems, Inc., Alexandria, VA, provides Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA). • SYtex Inc., Doylestown, PA, provides systems development and engineering support, and Threat Analysis support.
• Oracle Inc., Bethesda, MD, provides technical research, development, and test support. • White Oak Technologies, Silver Spring, MD, provides data harvesting and extraction support
• MZM Inc., provides data acquisition and storage support (and big checks to members of Congress!)
• UNISYS Inc., provides technical exploration and development support

It was a little item in a little article off the front page of the Washington Post this weekend, so perhaps you didn’t notice it.

It’s a confirmation that Total Information Awareness is alive and well in the federal government. Remember Total Information Awareness? It was the military program, run by John Poindexter, with the goal of developing a government database that would track the private lives of every law-abiding American, keeping watch over what we buy, who we call, what we write in our email, where we go online, where we travel within the United States, and so on.

Well, it turns out that an intelligence agency in the military will still be working on Total Information Awareness. The CIFA, which stands for Counterintelligence Field Activity, is a military intelligence agency that has traditionally been active on foreign soil against military enemies. Lately, however, the Bush Administration has been working on legislation, now under consideration by committees in the House and Senate, to give the CIFA the power to engage in criminal investigations and spying on American soil against American citizens.

The thing is that part of the CIFA’s mission is to engage in data mining - gathering bits of information about people from disparate sources. An unclassified government document, the Budget Item Justification for Defense Joint Counterintelligence Program, released in February of last year, it was revealed that the CIFA has been building “the leading edge information technologies and data harvesting and storage capabilities to support tactical, operational, and strategic risk and threat assessments.” That means that CIFA has the mission to gather information on people to determine if they are threats to the United States government. The same document also reveals that the CIFA has already been gathering this kind of information from commercial databases, recommending that the CIFA be given the funds necessary to “Continue to provide support to the CI community in the areas of exploiting commercial data”. Those commercial databases can include your bank records, your internet activities, and even your medical records.

Piece it together now. If the CIFA is given the authority to conduct criminal investigations and espionage within the United States and against American citizens, then Total Information Awareness will soon be fully operational. What’s truly frightening is that this military spying agency would be authorized to share and receive information from other government spy and law enforcement agencies. We already know that the FBI has been building huge files on the lawful activities of anti-war and anti-Bush protesters. If the new legislation passes, the CIFA will be given the power to feed those files into its giant computer database, and then to share information with FBI agents about your personal habits as well. Anything that you do electronically, and many things that you don’t do electronically, would become part of your permanent government record within just a few days of electronic processing.

What’s worse, your member of Congress may end up having no say in the matter. A secretive panel on espionage policy, co-chaired by archconservative retired judge Lawrence Silberman, has recommended to George W. Bush that the expansion of CIFA powers “could be taken by presidential order and Pentagon directive without congressional approval.”

Taking away your freedoms by military proclamation and spying on you under presidential orders appears to be the Republican Party’s new definition of “small government”.

George W. Bush and his Republican followers have long pursued a two-prong justification for doing nothing to deal with the growing crisis of global climate change. On the one hand, they claim there is no proof - that climate change is happening, or no proof that climate change is due to human causes, or no proof that climate change will do anybody any harm. On the other hand, the Republicans claim that no plan yet developed to deal with climate change is good enough, or “workable”.

A few days ago, the final nail in the coffin of Republican denial of global climate change was hammered in. One of the favorite arguing points of Republicans has been that global warming of the climate is taking place, but it might be just part of a larger natural cycle. Scientists from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica have finished their analysis of gases trapped in an ice core going back 600,000 years. The scientists found that, during all that time, there was no time when the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere came anywhere close to what exists today - in spite of the fact that there were six periods of natural warming and cooling during the time recorded in the ice core. Nothing natural - not storms or volcanoes or the ends of ice ages, ever rivalled the changes wrought by human industry.

What about the Republicans’ second line of defense - that no plan currently proposed is good enough? Well, that’s true, although starting with a partial plan years ago would have been much preferable to the complete inaction that we have seen. We’ve got to start somewhere, but Republicans have been arguing that we shouldn’t start at all.

The time for such nonsense has come to an end. There is an opportunity for the United States to finally take responsibility and join with the rest of the world to finally take strong action against global climate change. This week, representatives from around the world, including the United States are meeting in Montreal at a United Nationsl conference on climate change. The American delegation could follow its old habit of putting roadblocks in the way of any solution that is offered, playing obstructionist games instead of pitching in to help. Or, 15 years late, the USA could finally work with other nations to forge a plan with enough power behind it to actually work - a plan that goes beyond the limited goals of the Kyoto Accord that Bush killed years ago.

I’m watching skeptically, but with my fingers crossed.

In a certain sense, I can understand the protests. After all, it is beastly for Pope Benedict XVI, born under the name of Ratzinger, to exclude men from being priests just because they’re gay. A new policy from the Vatican allows men to become priests in the Catholic Church, but only after they overcome any “transitory” gay tendencies. Men with permanent gay tendencies, I guess, are eliminated, but dabbling is forgiveable - kind of like taking a drink every now and then.

So, yes, protest. That’s fine. But then I have to ask myself: What gay man in his right mind would want to be a priest in the Catholic Church? I admit that I really don’t get it, so maybe someone can try to explain this to me.

Here’s a church that says that what comes naturally to you is a terrible sin. The church is headed by a man who says it’s your religious duty either to get married heterosexually and make lots of Catholic kids or to become a priest or nun and not have any sex at all. This is a church that spends huge amounts of parishoners’ money to pay for political propaganda and lobbying against giving gay people equal rights.

Either you believe in what the Catholic Church teaches about homosexuality or you don’t. If you believe what the Church says, then don’t be gay. If you really believe the weird teachings of the Catholic Church about sex and sin, then have an exorcism done by a bishop or something, and then go on your merry way chanting to statues of Mary, hoping that they’ll weep blood, okay? But, if you don’t really believe what the Catholic Church teaches about sex and sin, then the only morally responsible thing to do is to be honest about it, and stop giving support to a Church that you believe is doing the wrong thing. To do anything else is to be a hypocrite.

I’ve talked to a couple of Catholics about this issue, and what they tell me is that they’re hoping that the Catholic Church will somehow “reform” on this issue, and they’re sticking around to see if it does. Pardon my bluntness, but hopes for such reform are ridiculous. People have been trying to reform the Catholic Church for generations, without success. Lay Catholics have been calling for female priests for a long time, for example, without success. The Catholic Church is not a democratic institution, and it’s silly for people who want reform in the Catholic Church to pretend that it is. The patriarchal need to control the details of people’s sex lives is inseparable from Catholicism. Take it out, and there is no Catholic Church left - just a bunch of old guys in pointy hats looking for something to do on Sunday mornings.

The Catholic Church is about as likely to give in to demands to accept homosexuality as it is to give in to my request to stop all that talk about Jesus. Gays can no more reform the Catholic Church than Buddhists can reform the 700 Club.

I expect to hear some blatherings about anti-Catholic prejudice in response to what I’ve written here. I don’t care. I don’t think that it’s prejudicial to ask that people finally decide if they’re Catholics or if they’re not Catholics. Catholic doctrine itself teaches that there’s not much middle ground. You’re either in it all the way, or you’re out all the way. So, please, confess your sins and give up your personal sexuality in surrender to the institutional sexual control collective of the Roman Catholic Church, or take some pride in yourself and stop being a servant to a bunch of guys in old robes who want to kick you when you’re down.

The Washington Post reports today that “Fitzgerald is still considering charges against Rove and that the investigation of Bush’s top aide continues.”

How do you think this investigation will conclude? Where do you think it will go next?

The first thing I want to do this morning is highlight the good work of an organization called the Student Press Law Center.

The SPLC offers free information and legal services to students who have their right to freedom of the press squashed by ignorant, oafish school administrators. When I say “ignorant oafish school administrators”, I’m thinking about Dwight Greer, an assistant principal at Beachwood High School in Ohio, who threatened student Max Eden with suspension if he distributed the underground newspaper The Bison Blowhard to other students. Greer didn’t even read a copy of The Blowhard. He just heard rumors that the paper would be objectionable, and told Eden that he would ban the paper on the grounds that it “will cause a disruption in the school”. Imagine that - students writing about ideas is now considered a disruption to the normal school process. Well, that explains how intelligent design theology got crammed into the science curriculum in Kansas.

I also think that the phrase “ignorant oafish school administrators” refers quite aptly to Oak Ridge Schools Superintendent Tom Bailey, who searched through teachers’ desks in his zeal to confiscate every last issue of the student newspaper at the high school. Tom Bailey explained that he had to squelch students’ rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution because there was an article in the newspaper discussing birth control. Bailey said he had “a responsibility to the public to do the right thing.” That’s true, but doing the right thing is not engaging in politically and religiously motivated censorship of student newspapers. Doing the right thing, for a Superintendent overseeing a public high school, is to encourage students to be active citizens, using their civil liberties in order to discuss important issues - especially issues that are relevant to teenagers, like birth control.

Those school administrators who think that they really have the power to keep students from discussing ideas freely ought to consider the origin of this web site - Irregular Times. In a sense, the origin of Irregular Times can be traced back to an underground student newspaper, The Student Voice. The Student Voice was distributed at North Rose - Wolcott High School back in 1987 and 1988. I myself remember how the school administration attempted to stop the production of that paper, hauling students into the office to issue them warnings - even though the students pulled into the office had nothing to do with the underground paper. Well, we kept on writing, and what we wrote eventually became Irregular Times.

Knowing typical high school administrators, I now have to explain in simple terms what the moral of the story is. The moral of the story is that censoring high school students doesn’t work. All that hamhanded administration attempts to interfere with the free student press accomplish is the education of young Americans in the important role of independent voices free of corrupt influence. Thanks to the jerks who tried to shut down The Student Voice, Irregular Times has been up and running online for over ten years. We look forward to hearing from the newer generations of independent media voices who are just now recovering from their own gag orders in the high schools of today.

The Associated Press Reports:

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy and tax charges and tearfully resigned from office, admitting he took $2.4 million in bribes to steer defense contracts to conspirators.

In a statement, prosecutors said Cunningham admitted to receiving at least $2.4 million in bribes paid to him by several conspirators through a variety of methods, including checks totaling over $1 million, cash, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees and vacations.

“He did the worst thing an elected official can do _ he enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there,” U.S. Attorney Carol Lam said. The statement did not identify the conspirators.

The case began when authorities started investigating whether Cunningham and his wife, Nancy, used the proceeds from the $1,675,000 sale to defense contractor Mitchell Wade to buy the $2.55 million mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. Wade put the Del Mar house back on the market and sold it after nearly a year for $975,000 _ a loss of $700,000.

Representative Cunningham is not the only member of Congress to be a recipient of MZM chief Mitchell Wade’s largesse.

FEC data reveals two other beneficiaries of the generosity of Mitchell Wade:

1. Republican Congressman Virgil Goode
2. Republican Congresswoman Katherine Harris.

The connections don’t stop there among these three ultra-conservative, no-account politicos: Virgil Goode has been connected to the nefarious doings of Jack Abramoff:

Rep. Virgil Goode (news, bio, voting record) Jr., R-Va., along with more than two dozen other members of Congress, signed a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton on Feb 27., 2002, that helped lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s clients. The lawmaker received about $1,000 from Abramoff, his lobbying partners and tribal clients between 2001 and 2004, all of which was sent in the period around which the letter was sent. (Associated Press, 11/17/05)

Katherine Harris took $20,000 from the Political Action Committee of Ultraconservative House Republican Tom Delay… the same PAC that the FEC found was illegally laundering money, the same PAC that was given free, undisclosed use of facilities by… Jack Abramoff!

Oh, me, oh my. Republicans and moral values? Gracious! What further news will come our way?

The military advertises itself as an institution of honor, respect, dignity and discipline - in spite of all the cases in which the military is caught participating in the most barbaric forms of behavior known to humanity: Mass slaughter of human beings, torture, and the development of weapons of mass destruction.

Here’s a note to all the kids out there who may be seduced by the military’s advertising into enlisting for a career of glory: The military has methods to beat you down and humiliate you before it builds you up into the kind of efficient killer it needs.

Just what kinds of beatings and humiliation might you face if you sign up for the military? Well, here in America, there’s an old tradition of sexually kinky and violent hazing rituals - some have even gotten soldiers killed. Over in Britain, this week, another example of what the military mentality perceives as “honor” was revealed: Soldiers were forced to take off their clothes and fight each other naked.

The British government said it was just “a bit of fun that got out of hand”. They say it was an initiation ceremony. You know, like the ones in the commercials, where they hand the soldier a sword, and everyone salutes. They just don’t show the forced naked wrestling parts, I guess.

Hey, kids, if you sign up for the same unit with your buddies from school, maybe you could go through the initiation together!

Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with two guys rolling around naked together, but you don’t have to sign up to enlist in the military to do it.

There is something wrong with two guys rolling around naked together trying to knock each others’ teeth out. There is something very, very wrong with the military forcing them to do it.

It’s bad enough that American and British soldiers in Iraq are sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners. Must we force our soldiers to do the same thing to each other?