The day after Father's Day

Yesterday was Father's Day, and I've found myself feeling distracted and melancholy all day today. I think I miss my Dad.

The odd part is, that would make a lot more sense if he was dead.

Let me explain.

Especially in the last several years, I've always had a pretty good understanding of myself. Some people go through life doing what other people expect, and never figure out why they aren't happy.

I got out of the military because George Bush got reelected. Unlike a lot of people, I've figured out what's important to me. I've looked into myself, found a person that I kind of like, and I cultivated that guy. I'm comfortable in my own skin.

My father was a career Army officer. A graduate of West Point and a field artilleryman, he eventually earned a degree in nuclear physics. So basically, he just kept finding bigger and better ways to kill more and more people. I always thought that was kind of cool.

But he was also a good officer. Which means that, to a large extent, he had to put his career first. "If the Army wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one, maggot!" It's not just a line in a movie - there are people in every branch of the service who actually believe it.

And he always had great control of his emotions. He'd laugh a lot, but only occasionally a full-out guffaw - it was more of an echo of laughter than a real sound of pleasure. But I remember him seeing him angry several times (it was usually my fault), and I could actually see it in his eyes. But for the most part, he kept himself on a fairly short leash.

So while I was growing up, I wasn't as close to my father as I might have liked.

Then, sometime after I graduated high school, he retired and moved clear across the country, from Virginia to Oregon. I only moved halfway across the country (from Virginia to Texas), and eventually entered the Air Force.

I was never sure what my father thought about my choice of:

1. The Air Force, and
2. the enlisted branch of the Air Force

He had to feel some pride that I was continuing the family tradition of military service, I suppose. But most officers also see the enlisted ranks as "grunts." The low end of the evolutionary scale. Cannon fodder. So I'm really not sure how he felt about that.

I was never a great fit in the military. And I'd never planned to spend more than one tour in the Air Force anyway. But with one thing and another, I was enlisted for 21 years, plus a few months.

My first base was in California. A days drive south Gold Beach, Oregon, where my parent had chosen to retire. I used to go visit them every year or so. At least at Christmas, if not more often.

During that time, my father grew his beard out, relaxed a lot, and became a genial gentleman farmer. My kids loved him. He laughed and joked and built things for them.

He wasn't the same guy I knew relatively well as a kid, but I adapted. Never really managed to get through the distance between us, though. There was always just the thinnest of separations. And I always thought that was a shame.

My wife can wax eloquent about her father. She can reminisce for hours about the things they did together when she was a kid. It nearly killed her when he died.

My dad is just some guy.

When my mom died, I had to come back from Germany for the funeral. My dad had been married to her for decades, and for the most part, I'm pretty sure that he loved her. He broke down several times over the course of that week. I'd never seen that before.

But life went on. I went from Germany to Wyoming, and then down here to Albuquerque. My dad sold the farm and did some traveling; he even lived in a motor home for awhile.

And then he married a woman in Gold Beach named Ann. She had a relatively large family in California, and she'd apparently always been close to them. They drove south to visit them all the time. Eventually, they even moved down there, to build a house and be closer to her family.

But oddly, farther from his.

I don't think it's anything conscious on their part - Ann has just always visited her kids. They're very close. I've only seen my father a limited number of times since he married her. We're not.

Things haven't been getting better as the years have passed. I'll call on birthdays, anniversaries, Father's Day. We usually talk for a while, exchange stories about what we've been doing, but it's kind of like talking to somebody in a bar. You tell them what you're doing at work, but nothing deep or meaningful.

Admittedly, I never called on Mother's Day - Ann might have thought it was a nice thing to do, but I have to admit, I'm closer to my father than I am to her. And she's never been my mother. She might be a nice lady, if a little straight-laced for my tastes. But she's never warmed to me.

Maybe it's because I've never fixated on money and fashion. I'm not a "success," in the classic American "get all you can NOW!!!" sense of the word. I make enough money to get by. I'm not rich. But I'm not broke. And I'm happy. I don't see where getting rich is worth the cost. I work with people who are trying to "claw their way to the top." I'm happy down here, about halfway up.

I have no idea if that has anything to do with how things are. I'm just sayin'. She's very close to her children. I haven't seen my dad in a couple of years now.

And I'll admit it. I haven't made much of an effort to go see him, either. Our phone conversations have become more and more stilted. Neither of us really has anything to say to the other. We talk for about fifteen minutes, more or less. He tells me what he's been doing. I tell him what the kids and I have been doing. Neither of us really goes in to how we're feeling about anything. I say "I love you, dad," and he responds with "I love you, Tiger," (he's always called me "Tiger"), but it's more out of rote habit at this point, I think.

If I were to go visit him, Ann would have no idea how to react, and we'd have stilted conversations at close range instead of over the phone. An uncomfortable few days, and I'd go home again. It doesn't seem worth the trouble.

And that's probably where the problem is. You're ingrained with it as a child in Sunday School: "Honor thy father and mother." Movies and literature are full of people undertaking huge, heroic quests to avenge the death of their father. There's national days to honor each of your parents individually.

What if your dad is just some guy? What if you have little or nothing in common?

And I'm really not sure whether I miss my dad, or if I miss the concept of my dad. I don't know whether there's a hollow spot shaped like him, or whether I just feel like there should be. I know who I am. And I know how I've always been told I should feel about my father. But that place inside me seems a little empty. Society tells me that I should have a bond, and there doesn't seem to be one. No link on either side.

So yesterday, I had a nice Father's Day. I spent it with my family, and I managed to forget to call my own father.

I didn't realize it until today. And I should feel worse about that. What I feel bad about is the fact that I don't really feel bad about it.

Mostly, the only person who tries to make contact in the last couple of years is me. I call him. He doesn't call me. Hell, he didn't even call on my last birthday. And I failed to call him yesterday. I know that I'm supposed to feel bad about that. But you know what? The thing that I feel bad about, is the fact that I don't.

I wonder if he noticed? He probably did. Or if he didn't, I have no doubt that Ann pointed it out to him. I should probably feel bad about that, too.

I don't know if the problem is me, or the lack of him.

And I don't have any answers.

22 Ways to be a Good Republican

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They found us. Can we go home now?

Does anybody remember one of the most oft-repeated mantras of the Bush administration regarding why we needed to stay in Iraq? It was simple enough for Bush to memorize it, and rhythmic enough for the average American to keep it in his head when Fox News went to their commercial break.

"We're fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here."

He’d rephrase it every so often, like "we're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don't have to face them here at home." And apparently, a lot of people were quoting his talking points back at him, too: "General John Vines put it well the other day. He said: 'We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us'."

He loved that bumper sticker. Or at least, he used to. Somehow, I don't think we'll be hearing that particular quote too often anymore.

You see, a suspected Muslim terrorist cell was just caught in a plot to blow up the JFK International Airport in New York. A big one. A huge plot. A plot that would have created untold death and destruction.

"The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable," U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it "one of the most chilling plots imaginable."

Go ask them on Fox News, and I'm sure that they'll tell you what a terrible, evil plan this was: "a plot to create a deadly jet-fuel firestorm reaching from New York to New Jersey."

And it was only stopped by one thing. The dogged determination and unstoppable fortitude of George W. Bush, and his continued insistence on shredding the Constitution.

Well, you know, Bush's policies and the laws of physics.

Federal authorities said that four men were hoping to blow up Kennedy International Airport and a large swath of Queens by detonating a fuel pipeline and storage tanks, but oil industry executives and local officials said yesterday that such a plot was probably not feasible.

While it is true that the tanks at Kennedy Airport are connected to a network of underground pipes that run from New Jersey through Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens, an exploding tank should not ignite the pipeline, they said. The pipes, which carry jet fuel, gasoline and heating oil, have valves that can be operated from headquarters in Pennsylvania to cut off the flow if sensors indicate that there might be a leak or rupture, said Roy Haase, an official of Buckeye Partners, the company that operates the pipeline.

Having worked most of my life on flightlines, I could have told them that. Fuel pipes have a series of valves and interlocks to prevent an explosion at one point from destroying the whole network. It's pretty simple. You don’t want to lose everything because one smoker can't figure out where to flick his cigarette butt.

Not, of course, that this is the only group of Muslim terrorists who have been captured "on American soil." It was only a month ago that six Keystone-Kop terrorists got caught trying to attack Fort Dix, NJ, wasn't it? A group that was caught, remember, because they took their training film to a local Circuit City to get copied onto a DVD.

Yup, that’s some good tactical planning, right there.

But apparently, despite the fact that the terrorists are apparently able to find America on a map and get here despite all the roadblocks in Fallujah, our President doesn't want to accept that his foreign policy in regards to Iraq could use a little work. In fact, it seems like every time our military does what the President says we need to do in order to go home, he moves the finish line farther back.

Attack Iraq? Yup, did that. Capture Saddam? Did that, too. "Free and democratic Iraq"? Hey, they had elections – doesn’t that count? Every time we have one of those "Mission Accomplished" moments, they come up with some new mission that we're supposed to accomplish.

And now, despite the fact that we're fighting them over there, it seems that we have to fight them over here, too. That doesn’t seem right, does it? If having our troops in Iraq doesn't stop the terrorists from coming to America, shouldn't we bring them back home to protect us here?

But something simple like logic isn't going to help our Republican friends see the light. For some reason, if you throw the words "Iraq" or "terrorism" into the mix, they lose their little minds.

For example, there's Dennis Milligan, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, who apparently likes the idea of Americans getting killed.

At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001], and the naysayers will come around very quickly

Why does Mr. Milligan hate the American people so much that he wants to see them dead?

Or then there's Dick Morris, another right-wing pundit, who has an even better argument for why we can't "cut and run."

I think that withdrawal from Iraq -- it obviously gives al Qaeda a huge victory. Huge victory. On the other hand, if we stay in Iraq, it gives them the opportunity to kill more Americans, which they really like.

One of the things, though, that I think the antiwar crowd has not considered is that, if we're putting the Americans right within their arms' reach, they don't have to come to Wall Street to kill Americans. They don’t have to knock down the Trade Center. They can do it around the corner, and convenience is a big factor when you're a terrorist.

I love that logic. "That's why we need to keep the military in Iraq! So that the terrorists can kill our troops!"

But maybe that’s the problem right there. There aren't enough American troops in Iraq for the terrorists to kill, and they're fighting back, too! Our Army needs to die faster!!

That's it! It isn't Bush's fault! The terrorists are winning because the military isn't doing a good enough job! They don't make good targets! That must be why the Bush Administration doesn't think that the military deserves a pay raise. The White House is taking all this flak, and it's really the military who sucks!

So, somebody tell me. Why does George Bush hate the military? Do they make him feel like less of a man? After all, there have only been a few Presidents who didn't have documented time in the military: Bill Clinton (who Bush's dad apparently likes better than him), Warren G. Harding, Grover Cleveland - there was a stretch in the first half of the 20th Century where no President had served in the military, but 31 out of 42 Presidents have done time in the military. Even the "increasingly irrelevant" Jimmy Carter did seven years as an officer in the Navy.

And unlike Bush, Carter can document his time. There isn't much to prove Bush's time in the National Guard except for a dog-eared list with his name on it.

So maybe that's the problem. Maybe Bush is experiencing some sort of Freudian disconnect, and that's why he doesn't mind when a few soldiers get killed. Maybe that could explain his behavior lately.

Let's get this man some therapy. And get our troops out of Iraq.

Everybody else is doing Memorial Day stuff. I'm going to do a movie review.

I very rarely see movies in theaters any more. Mostly because people, as a whole, suck. (Have I said that before?) For example, we went to a theater the other day (summer blockbusters often require the Big Screen), and I ended up with some cackling idiot behind me who talked to the screen. Apparently, the advent of the VCR took away the inclination of parents to train their children with the most important life lesson of all:

Shut the hell up during the movie!

So my wife and I get most of our movie-watching experiences at home on DVD. And the other night, we were looking for a random piece of fluff to watch - nothing too intellectual or high-brow. And since we'd enjoyed the Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore vehicle "Music and Lyrics" last week, we decided to rent the other music-related Hugh Grant movie from last year, "American Dreamz."

Let me make the following disclaimers here:

1. I'm not the world's biggest Mandy Moore fan. In fact, I make it a policy to avoid movies by pop princesses. But that's just me. I've never seen a Britney Spears movie (is there more than one, yet?). I never even saw a single episode of that Jessica Simpson reality show. On the other hand, I did see Dick Tracy, despite the fact that Madonna was in it. Likewise Vibes, with Cindy Lauper. (You see? I'll never get those hours of my life back. It's important to stick to your principles, even in movie-watching.)

(It's strange, really. Drew Barrymore, then Mandy Moore. Mr. Grant seems to be picking his female costars from the ranks of women who most of America think are amazingly beautiful, but who I don't really find attractive. It's like he's stalking me, trying to force me to watch movies with his costar, despite my disinterest in them. But I suppose that my paranoid fantasies are entirely unrelated to the subject matter at hand. As is my nightmare of Ann Coulter as a dominatrix, for that matter...)

2. I often enjoy the work of Hugh Grant. (But that's because I'm amazingly shallow.)

3. I have never seen an episode of American Idol. (Apparently, I'm not shallow enough.)

4. And lastly, I did, in fact, enjoy this movie. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to find fault in it.

For those of you who haven't seen it, this is a comedy about what happens when a Muslim terrorist cell infiltrates the cast of a show identical to American Idol, in a plot to use a bumbling (but music-obsessed) suicide bomber to kill the bumbling (but recently-reelected) President of the United States because of the damage he's caused in the Middle East. Hijinks ensue.

There are other "Dreamerz" (American Idol lookalikes) who I can recognize, even having avoided the show - Clay Aiken, Bo Brice, and a third one who might be Fantasia but I don't know enough about her to recognize any of her quirks.

Apparently, somebody wanted to make a parody that had enough pop culture (Mandy Moore, American Idol, and to an extent, Hugh Grant) that they could skewer the President, and still make money in red states. (And maybe they had dreamz of Joe Sixpack in Utah seeing this movie, having an epiphany, and suddenly becoming a Democratic activist. Yeah, good luck with that.)

This is a hugely unsubtle movie. Everything was painted with these huge, wide strokes that would make a housepainter proud. I'm not going to use the phrase "thinly-veiled" to describe anything, because this movie had no veils at all.

Not even on the Muslim women.

~~ ba-DUM!! ching! ~~

(To be honest, there were no Muslim women in evidence, except for a few who were thoroughly Americanized. So no burka's at all. There were no women at the terrorist camp at all, unless they were behind a couple of the cheap fake beards, doing some kind of Life-of-Brian homage. But I'm going to assume they weren't, at this point.)

My biggest argument with this movie, aside from the huge, unforgiving club they use to hammer their points home, would be the fact that their Bush-clone is a mindless drone whose only responsibility for the mess in the Middle East is the fact that he allowed himself to be led into it.

I can accept certain aspects of that.

a. George Bush is a hugely unimaginative C-student who is more than willing to allow himself to be led by people who appear to know more than he does.

b. George Bush has little or no knowledge of the Middle East.

c. Other people have instigated all of the damage he has caused in America and around the world.

However, rather than allowing himself to be led blindly into this mess, I personally believe that George Bush walked into everything with open eyes. He may not have been smart enough to set anything in motion himself, but he is the man in charge, and he's just too flamingly stupid to see that he's leading the charge into a bloody morass that's going to take years, if not decades, to dig our way out of.

In the movie, the Bush-clone is actually a good person, if stupid, who would stop the mess if he could. I don't believe that.

But, sure. See American Dreamz. Just don't expect anything world-shaking.

On the other hand, maybe you should rent it for your teenaged daughter and those proto-Republican mall-girls she hangs out with. Maybe it'll work on them.

Did God get tired of Falwell misrepresenting Him?

Jerry Lamon Falwell was born in Lynchburg, Tennessee on August 11, 1933. He died on Tuesday, May 15, 2007. It's now been five days, and he didn't rise after the first three. So maybe he had no right to judge people the way he did.

Jerry Falwell has done more harm to the American scene than most other people of his generation. His fanatical hatred of everything and everyone who didn’t follow his personal viewpoints on life, morality and religion caused him to create the Moral Majority, which can easily be said to have started the factionalism currently infecting the American political landscape.

I will give the man this much credit. He apparently never said that Tinky-Winky (one of the Teletubbies) was gay. That was a claim made by an unknown writer in Falwell’s National Liberty Journal. Which means that, although Falwell was responsible for the quote, he didn’t actually say it.

Falwell’s hatred of most of humanity led to him making all manner of stupid statements. I think that the most famous would have to be his attempt to blame 9/11 on everyone who disagreed with him.

"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve," said Falwell…

Falwell said the American Civil Liberties Union has "got to take a lot of blame for this…"

Then Falwell broadened his blast to include the federal courts and others who he said were "throwing God out of the public square." He added: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "

Some people will follow that statement with the claim that he later apologized for saying it.

But in a phone call to CNN, Falwell said that only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the deadly attacks.

"I do believe, as a theologian, based upon many Scriptures and particularly Proverbs 14:23, which says 'living by God's principles promotes a nation to greatness, violating those principles brings a nation to shame,'" he said.

Falwell said he believes the ACLU and other organizations "which have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded."

"I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812," he said.

If you read that carefully, he never apologized. He just said that, while the pagans (and abortionists and feminists and everybody else he didn't like) didn't actually fly the planes into the buildings, it was still their fault. (He also ignored things like geographical separation, and the other attacks on "our soil." Anybody remember the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Or what about domestic terrorists like the Unabomber?)

The man basically decided that anyone who didn’t follow his personal belief system was under the control of the devil. He didn’t support the idea of equal rights for anyone. Except, of course, white males. Even women, despite the fact that they make up more than half of the American population, were, in the dark and shadowed recesses of his closed mind, a “minority group.”

Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status.

But Falwell never had a positive view of any minority group.

At the height of the civil rights movement, in 1965, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an ambitious young minister in Lynchburg, Va., gave a sermon called "Ministers and Marches."

Falwell laid into Christian leaders who were actively supporting civil rights, reminding them of a Bible verse that fundamentalists often invoked as evidence that God did not want them to participate in politics: "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh" (II Corinthians 10:13)...

Falwell was plain enough about his views; in 1964, he told a local paper that the Civil Rights Act had been misnamed: "It should be considered civil wrongs rather than civil rights." His "Old Time Gospel Hour" TV program hosted prominent segregationists like Govs. Lester Maddox of Georgia and George Wallace of Alabama.

He later backpedaled from those views when they proved unpopular, and might have impacted on his collection plate. But he also, in 1985, supported the white minority government in South Africa, saying of Bishop Desmond Tutu "I think he's a phony, period, as far as representing the black people of South Africa." Although that statement was something else he had to apologize for, he still, in the words of a 1985 Time magazine story, "urged the good Christian folk of America to buy up gold Krugerrands and push U.S. 'reinvestment' in South Africa."

So, hide it though he might, and no matter how much he apologized for some of the blatantly wrong-headed bile he spewed to his followers, Jerry Falwell was a narrow-minded bigot, and his loss does not diminish the world in the slightest.

And let me just remind you of the words of a certain philosopher you might have heard of, Jesus of Nazareth. We won't even make it all the way to that seventh chapter in the Book of Matthew (7:1, if you're curious), where He says "Do not judge, or you too will be judged."

That's NIV, by the way. Me, I prefer the KJV language of "Judge not, lest ye be judged." But let's stick with the NIV for clarity of language, for now.

We'll stop at Matthew, Chapter 6, verses 1 through 6. And yes, this qualifies as Holy Gospel, incidentally.

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Words to live by, I think.

Let's look at the news

As my two regular readers might have noticed (and I'm only married to one of them, to the best of my knowledge), I usually prefer longer blog entries with multiple links, occasionally comparing or contrasting news items that I consider related in some way.

It's simple. By concentrating on this "long-form blogging" rather than the brief blurbs most bloggers go for, I can feel better about my sheer laziness in only posting an entry roughly once per week.

Not this week though. I found two unrelated stories this weekend that I'm going to heckle. That's just the way it is, sometimes. First of all, the reason I have no plans to move to Utah any time soon.

You have to admire any story that starts with:

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan's influence on illegal immigrants.

I mean, come on. For an opening line, you just can't beat that.

The group was unable to take official action because not enough members stuck around long enough to vote, despite the pleadings of party officials.

You kind of wonder if "embarrassment" had anything to do with that...

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants "hate American people" and "are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won't do."

And he's right. They'll pick lettuce for pennies per day, they'll collect your garbage, and generally do jobs that nobody else wants for less money than any American would accept. Anybody who tries to claim that they're "stealing jobs from Americans" needs to show me a list of Americans who would accept those jobs, at those wages.

"Illegal aliens are in control of the media..."

Excuse me? Not even Univision... ah, never mind.

...and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact," Larsen said.

(Excuse me while I misquote an American doing a bad Spanish accent.) You know, you keep saying that word "fact." I do not think that word means what you think that word means.

While I realize that Larsen probably doesn't consider "Roman Catholic" (the religion of most Mexican immigrants) to be equal to "Christian" (they are, after all, godless idolators under the sway of the Antichrist in the Vatican), it does give a somewhat limited definition to his concept of "Christian America."

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion."

"Self invasion"? They're invading themselves?

I suspect that he started to cry because he'd finally realized what an idiot he is.

One speaker, who was identified as "Joe," said illegal immigrants were Marxist and under the influence of the devil.

"Marxist"? This just gets better and better, doesn't it?

Another, who declined to give her name to the Daily Herald...

Again, "embarrassment," perhaps?

...said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because "they are not going to become Republicans and stop flying the flag upside down. ... If they want to be Americans, they should learn to speak English and fly their flag like we do."

So if their ship is taken by pirates, they won't be able to use the standard international symbol of distress?

Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a "true patriot and a close friend," was embarrassing the Republican Party.

Finally, somebody who makes a little sense.

"This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party."

Too late.

Larsen was allowed to finish the debate with a one-minute speech.

"If the Democrats take over the country, we will be dead, and we will have abortion and partial-birth abortion and the Republican Party will go into extinction," he said.

OK, let me get this straight. We'll all be dead, right? So how will we be getting abortions at that point?

And isn't the "Republican Party will go into extinction" bit a little redundant at that point?

But these mental giants couldn't manage to not embarrass themselves even when they switched to other subjects.

(Enid) Greene (state Republican Party chair) said she was disappointed in BYU professors who protested Dick Cheney's visit to campus, calling them "self-appointed intellectuals."

OK, folks. Be real. These guys were hired as professors. Yes, they're "intellectuals." Isn't that what you want as a teacher?

But they definitely don't qualify as "self-appointed." If anyone, BYU and the Dean of Faculty appointed them to that position, right?

But while that was my favorite story this weekend, I've got to pass along this little gem.

Two police officers pleaded guilty Thursday to manslaughter in the shooting death of a 92-year-old woman during a botched drug raid last fall. A third officer still faces charges... The charges followed a Nov. 21 “no-knock” drug raid on the home of Kathryn Johnston, 92. An informant had described buying drugs from a dealer there, police said. When the officers burst in without warning, Johnston fired at them, and they fired back, killing her.

Fulton County prosecutor Peter Johnson said that the officers involved in Johnston's death fired 39 shots, striking her five or six times, including a fatal blow to the chest.

He said Johnston fired only once through her door and didn't hit any of the officers. That means the officers who were wounded likely were hit by their own colleagues, he said...

When the plainclothes officers burst in without notice, police said, Johnston fired at them, and they fired back.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Yonette Sam-Buchanan said Thursday that although the officers found no drugs in Johnston's home, Smith planted three bags of marijuana in the home as part of a cover story.

So they're some real winners, right? Fine, upstanding knights in blue. (And really bad aims, too.)

But let's ignore the fact that a bunch of unidentified men broke into her house, and Ms. Johnston was only protecting her home. (Shouldn't the NRA be all over this story?) She was 92 years old! Let her get baked once in a while. At her age, she's earned it.

But that isn't the punchline. This is.

The case raised serious questions about no-knock warrants...

Well, duh! But it gets better.

...and whether the officers followed proper procedures.

Yup. That's would be the question, all right...

Well, I already talk about politics. Might as well include religion.

My son is now an ordained minister. I don't really know what to make of that.

When he was a kid, we asked him what he wanted to be. His answer? "A policeman, a fireman and Spiderman." So this seems like a step down, really.

Technically, there are probably people who might argue the point of whether he qualifies as a priest of any kind. He got ordained for free over the internet, by the Universal Life Church, because he wanted to perform the wedding for two of his friends.

This might possibly come as a surprise to my sisters: one's a Wiccan and might be OK with it, but the other is an ordained Episcopal minister. Somehow, I don't think she'll see the humor in all this, really.

But that isn't the most disturbing news on the religious front, though.

Studies are now coming to light that show that "abstinence-only" programs, Bush's biggest "faith-based agenda" effort, don't work. They're ineffective. Not only do these programs not have any effect on whether children will have sex, they don't even have any effect on whether the sexually-active children will use a condom. (At least a traditional sex-ed class can improve that statistic.)

That's $176 million dollars in federal money, and millions more in state and local grants, teaching a program with no effect at all. And they intend to waste more money starting this year, because they plan to push it on adults (as old as 29) despite the fact that it's a complete waste of our tax money.

However, we can take heart in the fact that this program was merely ineffective. Usually, the policies coming from the White House are disasterous and destructive - in effect, the "abstinence-only" program is actually an improvement in job performance for our Chief Executive.

And in other news, the latest hero of the Religious Right is Gordon James Klingenschmitt, a former chaplain for the Navy. He says that, in March 2005, he was released from the Navy as punishment "because he refused to practice a 'government-sanitized' faith that he calls 'Pluralism,' with a capital P." He claims that he was kicked out of the Navy because he wanted to "pray in Jesus' name." (The Religious Right calls him "Chaplain," or sometimes just shorten it to "Chaps." There are so many Village People jokes here, I don't know where to begin.)

You can trust me on one thing, by the way. Having gone to military chapels for my entire life, there is no shortage of prayers to Jesus or about Jesus, and the vast majority are in Jesus' name. And I've even met one or two chaplains who seemed to think that they might be Jesus (I'm pretty sure they were wrong).

After Klingenschmitt (or his handlers) convinced the Kentucky House of Representatives to honor him for his "service to God, country and the Commonwealth of Kentucky," his former commandant, Capt. Norm Holcomb, sent an email to the members of the Kentucky House, explaining what actually happened. The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State (who, admittedly, have their own agenda on the matter) printed part of Holcomb's letter.

I was the dishonored ex-chaplain's supervisor for the past 2 years... I found him to be totally untruthful, unethical and insubordinate. He was and is contemptuous of all authority. He was not court martialed for praying in Jesus' name. I sent him out in uniform every week to pray at various ceremonies and functions. He always prayed in uniform and in Jesus' name. He was never told that he could not pray in Jesus' name. In fact, the issue of prayer had nothing at all to do with his dismissal from the Navy. He disobeyed the lawful order of a senior officer. I am sure that you understand that Navy Regulations forbid any of us, regardless of rank or position, to appear in uniform in support of any political or partisan event.

At the time that it happened, incidentally, even the Associated Baptist Press (speaking of people with their own agenda) reported it this way:

But the commanding officer at Klingenschmitt's base, Capt. Lloyd Pyle of the Norfolk Naval Station, had earlier ordered him, in writing, "not to wear your uniform for this or for any other media appearance without my express prior permission." Pyle's order came shortly after Klingenschmitt spent 18 days last December on a hunger strike in front of the White House to protest the policy on sectarian prayers.

Of the conviction, Klingenschmitt said he was only "guilty of praying in Jesus' name," according to the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. His attorneys claimed that he had the right to appear in uniform at the event because he was conducting a bona fide religious service.

But the jury agreed with prosecutors, who argued that the evangelical Episcopalian's uniformed presence at the press conference alone was sufficient to determine he had violated Pyle's order and military policy.

But that isn't the way you're going to hear it from his supporters these days.

And finally, the most important news story about the things we worship would have to be this:

The federal Food and Drug Administration is proposing to redefine the very essence of chocolate and to allow big manufacturers such as Hershey to sell a bar devoid of a key ingredient — cocoa butter. The butter's natural texture could be replaced with inferior alternatives, such as vegetable fats. And consumers would never know.

There's even a website which will tell you how to defend your constitutional right to good chocolate. Those of us who've lived in Germany, and eaten chocolate made in Europe for European consumption know that Hershey's is a waxy, paraffin-filled bar of faux-chocolate already. Don't let them make it worse.

They can have my chocolate when they pry it from my cold, dead, chubby fingers.

Honesty. It's such a lonely word.

I took a month or so off, so this one's a long one, even for me.

We continue to be plagued by a distinct lack of honesty in our government. And although the Democrats are probably making a few lies here and there, it's the overwhelming, snowballing dishonesty of the Republican party that's coming to the surface lately. Lying and hypocrisy seem to be the only two family values left to the Republicans.

George Bush gave a speech to an American Legion post in Virginia earlier this month. Which, by itself, is fascinating. Considering how he allows veterans to be treated at Walter Reed, you'd think that he'd have second thoughts about standing in front of a crowd of them.

(Of course, his first thoughts aren't usually particularly impressive, so I doubt that the second ones would be much better...)

He even had the unbelievable cojones to bring up the fact that he belonged to an American Legion post in Houston. Does the Legion allow other people to join when the very few records that they can find show that they didn't even manage to fulfill the minimal requirements of Vietnam-era National Guard service? As opposed to the current National Guard requirements, where the "surge" that was supposed to only involve 21,500 troops (if you ignore the extra 8,100 support troops, anyway) has recently been further swelled by adding Iraq and Afghanistan tours for another 12,000 National Guard and Reserve troops.

And as Bush stood there in front of his American Legion audience, he even trotted out one of his oldest catch-phrases. He said to them that "We want to defeat them there, so we don't have to face them here." Which is fascinating, since only 4 days earlier, we learned that military and diplomatic experts all agreed that the "over there" argument is a fairly feeble-minded thing to say.

"The president is using a primitive, inarticulate argument that leaves him open to criticism and caricature," said James Jay Carafano, a homeland security and counterterrorism expert for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization...

Daniel Benjamin, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, agreed.

"There are very few foreign fighters who are going to be leaving the area because they don't have the skills or languages that would give them access to the United States," said (Daniel Benjamin, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution), who served as the National Security Council's director for transnational threats from 1998 to 1999. "I'm not saying events in Iraq aren't going to embolden jihadists. But I think the president's formulations call for a leap of faith."

"The war in Iraq isn't preventing terrorist attacks on America," said one U.S. intelligence official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he's contradicting the president and other top officials. "If anything, that - along with the way we've been treating terrorist suspects - may be inspiring more Muslims to think of us as the enemy."

In fact, if anything, the Middle East situation is making us less safe. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate was just released, and it explains that the Iraqi conflict is only making jihadist fundamentalism in the Middle East stronger.

Thank God that Bush won't be reading that report either. It might depress him.

John McCain has been pushing Bush's little war for some time, and tried to tell America that there were parts of Baghdad where you could walk down the street in safety. And he was called on that lie by a reporter who was, in fact, in Baghdad at the time, who said that he didn't know what Never-never Land McCain was talking about.

Because John McCain is never willing to admit that his "Straight Talk Express" has left the tracks, he went to Baghdad and took a walk in a market to show how safe it was. Safe, at least, if you have a hundred armed soldiers, two Blackhawk helicopters, body armor and up-armored Humvees. Sucks to be the locals, though, who told anyone who'd listen that it was all a PR stunt, and who went back to being shot at and blown up right after McCain left.

Pope Benedict XVI came out and criticized evolution, saying it can’t be proved. Which is ironic, since he’s a pretty strong supporter of that whole "God" thing.

(I am so going to Hell.)

Of course, this is, after all, his job, so you can't really call that a lie, or even hypocrisy – you would kind of hope that he actually believed in his own religion (especially if you're Catholic). But I've been hoping to make that joke ever since I saw the story. So there you go.

On the subject of hypocrisy, though, Bob Barr was once a hard-line GOP senator from Georgia. In 1998, he single-handedly prevented the voters of the District of Columbia from enacting a medical marijuana measure which they'd approved, by creating what is known as the "Barr Amendment" (the city is stripped of all funding if they attempted to "enact or carry out" any such initiative). But now that he's left the Senate, he became (as so many do) a lobbyist. Ironically, he's lobbying for the Marijuana Policy Project. And his first job will be to try to tear down the Barr Amendment.

Don Imus received some publicity that he didn’t want recently when he referred to a primarily black women's basketball team as "nappy-headed ho's." That, in itself, is not a lie, if that's the way Imus felt about it. He's allowed to be a racist, after all. And at least he's open about it. But SilentPatriot on CrooksAndLiars.com makes a valid point.

"Human Events" editor Terry Jeffrey said that Don Imus "represents a general decline in standards in American broadcasting" and that politicians should avoid his show because they would then have to "take a stand on the various outrageous things he says." During his high and mighty sermon of decency, Jeffrey conveniently ignores the far more toxic venom spewed on a daily basis on conservative talk radio.

(Here’s where they put the link to download or watch – you’ll have to go there to see it, though. I’m not going to eat their bandwidth. That’s rude, and I’m not John McCain.)

Imus' statements past and present — documented here by MediaMatters — are deplorable and should be condemned. That goes without saying. The point, however, is the blatant double standard. Did Dick Cheney have to "take a stand" on Rush Limbaugh's myriad racist/sexist/insensitive remarks before going on his show last week? Did Secretary Gates have to condemn Laura Ingraham for advocating that her listeners jam the Democratic voter assistance lines in November before chatting it up last week?

So, technically, I’m not sure if you can call Mr. Jeffrey's statement a lie, or simple hypocrisy (SilentPatriot goes with the latter), but I think it's worth inclusion here.

(And having mentioned John McCain again, I should point out that I have no problem with gay marriage. Particularly marriage between passionate females.)

(I would like to apologize for that last joke; the persons responsible have been sacked. Along with their llama.)

A lawyer with the Justice Department is invoking the Fifth Amendment in the investigation of the politically-motivated firings of US Attorneys. Which, if you think about it, tells you something. The applicable part of the Fifth Amendment, in this case, reads "No person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..." (At least, I'm pretty sure that's the important part. This counts as a grand jury, and part of the "due process of law." Of course, maybe they teach these things differently at the Pat Robertson School of Law.)

So, exactly what crime is it that she committed? Because, after all, that's the whole purpose of the Fifth Amendment. You can't use it to avoid telling the truth about other people, can you? (But again, maybe they teach these things differently at Pat Robertson U.)

However, to get ready for that same Senate testimony, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has cleared off his desk, and is devoting all his resources to preparing to testify. But it’s not going well.

Gonzales kept contradicting himself and "getting his timeline confused," said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got "exasperated" with him, the source added. "He's not ready," Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales's public-affairs chief, told the A.G.'s top aides after the session was over, said the source.

But, as Kevin Drum points out in Washington Monthly,

If Gonzales was planning to simply tell the truth, he wouldn't "keep contradicting himself" in practice sessions and he wouldn't need to bring his schedule to a standstill in order to figure out what he's planning to say. He'd just review the appropriate documents to make sure he had his dates straight and then tell Congress what happened.

You know, you'd hope that people elected to the highest offices in the country would think that it was their duty to be honest and forthright with the American people.

But of course, if you believe that, then you must also be living in Never-never Land. Right next door to John McCain.
~~~~~

You Don't Know Dick, part II

It's fascinating. We have Darth Cheney half a world away, saying that Nancy Pelosi's plan would embolden the terrorists, and when Pelosi gets a little miffed, saying that Cheney is questioning her patriotism, he refuses to back down from his statement, saying that "I didn't question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment."

Well, gee. That makes it all better, doesn't it?

It also showed that he wasn't listening to what she said.

"You cannot say as the president of the United States, 'I welcome disagreement in a time of war,' and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country," the speaker said.

By the way, the President wasn't willing to talk to her. She only managed to talk to Josh Bolton, Bush's chief of staff.

And Frank Rich raised some interesting points about the "War on Terra."

Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it's revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on "Meet the Press" that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was "pretty well confirmed," he said (though it was not), that bin Laden's operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center...

The president now says his government never hyped any 9/11-Iraq links. "Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq," he said last August after finally conceding that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact everyone in the administration insinuated it constantly, including him. Mr. Bush told of "high-level" Iraq-Qaeda contacts "that go back a decade" in the same notorious October 2002 speech that gave us Saddam's imminent mushroom clouds. So effective was this propaganda that by 2003 some 44 percent of Americans believed (incorrectly) that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis; only 3 percent had seen an Iraq link right after 9/11.

Though the nonexistent connection was even more specious than the nonexistent nuclear W.M.D., Mr. Bush still leans on it today even while denying that he does so. He has to. His litanies that we are "on the offense" by pursuing the war in Iraq and "fighting terrorists over there, so that we don't have to fight them here" depend on the premise that we went into that country in the first place to vanquish Al Qaeda and that it is still the "central front" in the war on terror. In January's State of the Union address hawking the so-called surge, Mr. Bush did it again, warning that to leave Iraq "would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy."

But now more than ever, the opposite is true. It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn't used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: "Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is." It's typical of Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

That mistake - dropping the ball on Al Qaeda - was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a "truce" with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. "This deal is not at all with the Taliban," the president said, claiming that "this is against the Taliban, actually."

(OK, if you want to read the source article and really don't want to deal with TimesSelect and their "14-day free trial," read most of the column here, here or here.)

(In the course of his flip-flopping on Osama, Bush swung to both extremes: from completely ignoring him one moment, to telling the late Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, that if he ever caught bin Laden, "I will screw him in the ass!" Isn't that a lovely visual? Our boy Bush is always such a cultured, well-spoken representative of the United States, isn't he?)

During his interview in Australia, Cheney also said something kind of startling.

In the interview, Cheney also said Britain's plans to withdraw about 1,600 troops from Iraq — while the United States adds more troops — was a positive step. "I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," the vice president said.

As Jay Leno put it, "The British announced they were pulling their troops out of the Iraq. Dick Cheney immediately called it good news. He said, 'It's a sign that we're winning.' How come when our allies pick up and leave, that's a victory for us? But when we leave, it's a victory for al Qaeda? How does that work?"

So let me just come right out and say it. I don't believe that George Bush, the inarticulate C-student, would be as destructive as he has been, if he didn't have Cheney leading him around on a leash. Dick Cheney has consistently lied to the American people about Iraq, about the Al Qaeda, and now about Iran. While he was second-in-command in America, Halliburton was enriched to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, which consequently made Dick Cheney massive amounts of money. American actions in the Middle East under his watch have destroyed the international respect for our country, beggared our treasury, and has spawned a massive groundswell of terrorists in the Middle East who did not exist before.

More American citizens have now died in Iraq than were killed in the World Trade Center. Who, then, is the bigger threat to America? Al Qaeda, or Dick Cheney?

I definitely question Dick Cheney's judgement. And I also question his patriotism.

Is this the kind of winner we want to see in office?

Rudolph William Louis "Rudy" Giuliani III was born May 28, 1944. He first rose to prominence in the US Attorney's office, successfully prosecuting Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for insider trading, and indicting eleven organized crime figures, including the heads of New York's "Five Families," under the RICO Act. He also was the first prosecutor to successfully use the RICO act against non-organized crime, indicting Marc Rich and Pincus Green for tax evasion and making illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis (which, oddly, led to presidential pardons for both of them).

As Mayor of New York City, he reduced crime in the city, continued his fight against organized crime, and agressively attempted a program of urban renewal (including his work to turn Times Square into more of a tourist destination).

On September 11, 2001, it was Rudy's actions leading the response to the World Trade Center attack that seemed to cement his position as "America's Mayor" (and Time Magazine's 2001 "Person of the Year).

And now, Rudy Giuliani™(© 2006) has declared his candidacy for President of the United States (although most people already knew it was coming).

Oddly, though, not everybody seems to appreciate this paragon on virtue and leadership. Jonathen Alter explains in Newsweek why Rudy's temperament might make him a risky pick for president. Ezra Klein suggested that Rudy might be a bit autocratic for the job. And over on Blah3, they expand on that point to highlight evidence that the man is thin-skinned, autocratic, and prone to using the power of his office to pummel his opponents. Even the lower-profile blogs are digging up fascinating information on the man, like his role as a George Bush cheerleader ever since 2001.

And during the 2004 election, Jimmy Breslin, whose name is practically synonymous with New York City, had this to say about Rudy.

He was a nobody as a mayor and in one day he became a hero. This sudden career, this door opening to a room of gold, all started for Rudolph Giuliani when his indestructible bunker in World Trade Center building blew up. He had personally selected it, high in the sky, and with tons of diesel fuel to give emergency power.

And Guiliani walks on. He walks from his bunker, up Barclay Street and went on television. Went on and announced his heroism and then came back every hour or so until he became a star, a great figure, a national hero, the mayor who saved New York.

Most of this comes from these dazed Pekingese of the Press. As this was being written on Friday night, the television announcers kept saying that Martha Stewart would go to a country club federal prison. The fools. Try any jail on any day. At five o'clock, you can't go home. Giuliani was a hero with these news people. He did not pick up a piece of steel or help carry one of the injured off.

Can America's Mayor become America's President? (Or might he make a better First Lady?)

John McCain - Weathervane

You know, there was a time when I respected John McCain. That time is long gone.

He seemed like that rarity, an honest politician. A Vietnam vet and former POW, he stood up to the Religious Right for their intolerance, and to the Swift Boat Veterans for their lies. He seemed like one of the few Republicans I could vote for.

But the more I learn about him, the more I discover that it's all a front.

In 2000, when we listened to Candidate McCain, we heard things like this:

McCain said he hoped his February comments about the "agents of intolerance" of the Christian Right did not "alienate the voters of so-called Christian Right...I value their commitment to moral values and family standards but I as a person want our party to be an inclusive party."

"I don't believe the leadership of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is healthy for my party...I want a party that says we care about everyone, a party of addition not division."

Almost a year ago, on Meet the Press, Tim Russert called him on his spin.

MR. RUSSERT: You came out and said we should teach intelligent design in classes as well as evolution. Jerry Falwell... you’re now giving the commencement address at Liberty University in May. This is what you said about Jerry Falwell in February of 2000. Let’s watch.

(Videotape, February 28, 2000):

SEN. McCAIN: Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: "Agents of intolerance." And you were asked about that speech and you said this: "I must not and will not retract anything that I said in that speech at Virginia Beach. It was carefully crafted. It was carefully thought out." Based on that, do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?

...

SEN. McCAIN: I met with Reverend Falwell, he came to see me in Washington. We, we agreed to disagree on certain issues and we agreed to move forward. I believe that speaking at Liberty University is no different from speaking at the New College or Ohio State University...

MR. RUSSERT: But Senator, when you were on here in 2000, I asked you about Jerry Falwell, and this is what you said.

(Videotape, March 5, 2000):

SEN. McCAIN: Governor Bush swung far to the right and sought out the base support of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. That’s—those aren’t the ideas that I think are good for the Republican Party.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think that Jerry Falwell’s ideas are now good for the Republican Party?

SEN. McCAIN: I believe that the... "Christian right" has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason is, is because they’re so active, and their... followers are. And I believe they have a right to be a part of our party. I don’t have to agree with everything they stand for, nor do I have to agree with everything that’s on the liberal side of the Republican Party...

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?

SEN. McCAIN: No, I don’t. I think that Jerry Falwell can explain to you his views on this program when you have him on.

MR. RUSSERT: After September 11th... Reverend Falwell had [this] to say. "What we saw on [September 11th ], as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve. ... I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle... I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " ...Are you embracing that?

SEN. McCAIN: I am speaking at the, at the graduation of his, his university. I’m not embracing all of the tenets that are expressed at the New College in New York City, nor other liberal universities and institutions that I have spoke at.

So what happened to the "Straight Talk Express"? Did it run off the rails?

The Arizona Republican told The Dallas Morning News that he has "established a very good relationship" with the Rev. Jerry Falwell and has reached out to Richard Land, a one-time Criswell College professor who heads the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In Texas, Mr. McCain said, he has met with San Antonio evangelist John Hagee to express a shared "commitment to the state of Israel."

Let's go over those names again.

Jerry Falwell: Well, I think enough was said about him during the Meet the Press transcript up above. An egotistical hypocrite, but one who's managed to make himself rich off the donations of his flock (which, incidentally, is true of the next two guys, too).

Richard Land: One of Bush's closest advisors, Richard Land is also outspokenly homophobic and violently opposed to abortion. He called the FDA's approval of the Plan B pill a "sad day for America;" however, Plan B prevents the release or fertilization of an egg, which means that Land is opposed to an option that would prevent the abortion of fetuses. Go figure.

John Hagee: One of the highest-paid evangelists in America, Hagee blames the sinful people of New Orleans for Hurricane Rita, he supports the idea of a nuclear war in the Middle East, because he's an ardent believer in the coming Rapture.

These sanctimonious Dominionists are the people John McCain is sucking up to? That's bad enough to lose my respect for the man. And I didn't even touch on McCain's flip-flops on other issues. Like backing off of a torture ban after initially proposing it. Or hiring the company that produced the "Swift Boat Veterans" ads, who he once called "dishonest and dishonorable."

(Russert mentions several of McCain's sudden reversals in the MTP interview above. Go read it.)

I don't have time for McCain. He points whichever way the wind is blowing. Let's elect people willing to stand up for what's right this time around.

It's not "Global Warming"! It's just "Climate Change"!

In his State of the Union speech, Bush said something that must have hurt, just to feel it in his mouth. "America is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to live our lives less dependent on oil. And these technologies will help us be better stewards of the environment, and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change."

We have top scientists telling us that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is the highest it's been in two-thirds of a million years! Let's be clear on that. The scientists are telling us that the carbon dioxide is higher than it's been in longer than the biblical scholars believe that the earth has existed!

I'm thinking that this tells us that God doesn't want the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be this high. Somebody else might have other ideas what this means, but they just make the baby Jesus cry.

Anyway, since the President is now willing to admit that global warming... oh, sorry, "climate change" exists, his chief advisors are suddenly willing to tell the truth.

The human role in climate change is no longer debatable, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said today...

"Human activity is contributing to changes in the Earth's climate," Bodman said at a press conference in Washington. "That issue is no longer up for debate."

Yeah, but meanwhile, despite the fact that it's not debatable, apparently the debate rages on.

Despite a strongly worded global warming report from the world's top climate scientists, the Bush administration expressed continued opposition today to mandatory reductions in heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases.

I'd say that the record profits posted by the gas companies might have something to do with this non-policy change, but that would be rude, wouldn't it?

I mean, let's consider the spectacular record that Bush has on the environment. I mean, after all, he...

No, really, he...

OK, so he kind of sucks on environmental issues. Consider mercury poisoning.

In March of 2005, the agency set limits on the amounts of mercury that could be emitted by power plants. At the time, the EPA said that they couldn't make the limits more "aggressive" because the cost to the industry was already more than the public health benefit.

Which would have been true, if they weren't ignoring a study by Harvard University that said that slightly greater limits would have health benefits worth more than five billion dollars per year, but would cost the industry three quarters of a billion dollars.

This was a study that the EPA had paid for, that was co-authored by an EPA scientist, and that was peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists. In common language, the EPA wasted our tax dollars to ignore a study that might have made Americans healthier.

At first, the EPA claimed that the study results didn't get to them in time for their deadline. When interviews and documents proved that to be a lie, they switched their stories, and claimed that the Harvard study was using "flawed" data about the heart problems caused by mercury contamination. They did manage to stick by their original claim that the health benefits would only be around fifty million dollars, though.

The government's action lends an interesting light to the fact that the EPA dismantled a previous working group on mercury, just as they were about to require much more stringent regulations from all coal-burning power plants in America.

With their new ruling, the EPA completely ignored previous studies that showed that mercury contamination in seafood caused irreversible damage not only to the hearts of adults, but to brain functions in infants.

Let's repeat the most important word there: "irreversible." As in "can't be fixed."

The EPA had accepted those studies at the time, and as a result, had already suggested that pregnant women limit their intake of seafood to no more than twelve ounces per week.

Of course, that was then. This is now. The Bush administration now seems to be quite happy with the idea of a brain-damaged electorate. I wonder why that is?

They'll probably be telling us to eat more seafood next.

How's the view from that cross?

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
~~ Jules Feiffer

Last week, James Kopp, who was convicted to 25-to-life last month for the sniper killing of a doctor in 1998, was also convicted on federal charges for the same crime. Kopp had killed Dr. Barnett Slepian in the doctor's Amherst, NY home, and tried to claim in both federal and state trials that he only wanted to wound the doctor, to prevent him from performing abortions.

Incidentally, Kopp has also been charged by Canadian authorities for the 1995 killing of Ontario Dr Hugh Short, and wanted for questioning in other Rememberance Day assassinations of abortionists.

OK, let's be clear here. The Federal government didn't really have a choice in the matter. Although you will never hear George W. Bush admit it in public, Kopp was a domestic terrorist, part of a collection of lunatics who believe that the killing of abortionists is justified.

(In fact, Kopp tried to use that very defense: what he did was justified to "save the lives of the preborn." But the judge made a very simple ruling: abortion is legal. Murder isn't.)

And although the government doesn't have a very good record of hunting down right-wing terrorists, every once in a while, they do try to do their jobs. (Or, to look at it another way, even a broken clock is right twice a day.)

Now, I don't think I've covered this aspect of my personality much (and I'm too lazy to go back and look), but I'm an agnostic. Despite what a number of people have tried to tell me about myself, I'm not an athiest. Denying the possibility of some godlike force is just as much of a leap of faith as saying that there is some huge old guy in the sky who gets cranky if you don't kneel a lot. I don't know which point of view is true (although I lean more toward the athiest end of things, admittedly), but to be honest, it makes no real difference in my life.

In fact, the last set of dog tags I wore in the military proclaimed me to be a Zen Agnostic, which, if you think about it, translates loosely to "I don't know, and I don't care."

But I strongly believe that the interference of Christians in our day-to-day life only leads to a tragedy of Biblical proportions. Dogs and cats living together! (And Rag-time, shameless music, that'll grab your son and your daughter with the arms of a jungle animal instinct! Mass-staria!)

When you let our Christian friends take charge of things, you get ugliness on a monumental order. You get parents suing to keep Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in a classroom. Care to guess why?

The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

And the madness doesn't stop there. You end up with crap science: for example, Bush's choice as head of the FDA's advisory council on reproductive health is trying to tell America that premarital sex interferes with the ability to fall in love. OK, more accurately, the ability to form healthy, lasting, loving relationships. And it all revolves around the nanopeptide Oxytocin. But what it means is that he's claiming to now have scientific evidence that people must practice abstinence before marriage.

You end up with the ugliness that was the Terri Schiavo case - a brain-dead girl whose undead body is kept alive by machines, because the Religious Right said that it must be so.

You end up with Park Rangers at the Grand Canyon who aren't allowed to mention the geologic age of the rocks around them, for fear of annoying the creationists. (Oh, yeah, plus, the park bookstores sell a book that tells us that the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah's flood, not geologic forces.)

And you end up with vitriolic arguments about evolution, and people trying to tell you that soy protein makes you gay. And, for that matter, ignorant arguments about gays, both in general and specifically in the military. (Man, I am starting to quote myself entirely too often. This is probably bad...)

And it isn't just science. They like to try rewriting history, too. And the whole religious thing leads to a bunch of really, really dangerous ideas.

We also end up with other, random bits of humor, though. Like the Virgin Mary in a grocery store freezer (and, incidentally, Jesus in a doggie door). And christianity being used as a marketing ploy on some really questionable items.

So overall, as I said, I really don't have a problem with religious people. (Did I say that? I probably should have said that somewhere. Well, hell, at least I have now, right?) But I very strongly suspect that it isn't a good idea to put them in charge.

Update: One benefit (if that’s the right word) of going to a military chapel is that you get to rub up against peoples of various faiths. So I've had opportunity to see the various flavors of evangelical service in action. And I've noticed something.

There's a word that the "contemporary" services have usurped as their own, and they like to base entire songs around it. That word is "worthy." In fact, I've heard a song where the verse (or possibly chorus) was made up of repetitions of the phrase "He is worthy," over and over. I realize that the phrase is a truncated version of "He is worthy of praise" or something similar, but the following argument still applies.

The evangelical community needs to consider their word choice a little harder. Let's break this down into the most simple form.

1. "Worthy" is the adjectival form of "worth."
2. "Worth" is a value judgement, indicating that one thing is compared to another.
3. It's awfully generous of them to decide that God, creator of the universe and all things in it, compares favorably against Brand X. And it's nice that they feel authorized to make this decision.

It's not a game, George

President Bush went on television last night to explain his "new way forward" to America. But his "new way" is strangely similar to the "old way." We stay in Iraq for the conceivable future, and more troops are sent into the line of fire.

See, if you're an Iraqi insurgent, then this "new way forward" is just leading you into a "target-rich environment."

You know, it's strange. Bush feels that he can ignore the American people, 64% of whom disagree with his handling of the war. He feels that he can ignore the military (a traditionally hawkish bunch): in a Military Times poll of active-duty servicepeople, a majority of the troops who responded disapproved of how Bush is handling Iraq.

It was just last month that George W. Bush said "it's important to trust the judgment of the military when they're making military plans… I'm a strict adherer to the command structure." But now, with his plan to put more troops into Iraq, he's even ignoring the advice of his generals.

But this is nothing new. Bush doesn't feel that he needs to consult Congress when he attacks somebody. He's proven this twice in the last week, both in Somalia and with the troops he's planning on deploying into Iraq. He doesn't act like a military commander - he's more like a kid with an army of plastic soldiers - you can almost see him pushing them around the carpet of the Oval Office, making "blam… rat-a-tat-tat" noises.

He's proven over and over that nobody in the Bush White House is a constitutional scholar. I'm not sure that anybody working at 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard has ever actually read that document. Because the Constitution is pretty clear on the subject.

Way back in 1781, having just broken away from a King, the Constitutional Congress didn't support the idea that one person could unilaterally declare war on another country. The President may be Commander-in-Chief of the military, but if you actually look at the document they created, you find out that in Article 1, Section 8, it says that

"The Congress shall have Power...
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress..."

But Bush isn't just ignoring the will of the people and the law. He's ignoring common sense. General Petraeus, who Bush just placed in charge of the forces in Iraq, drew up a strategy to defeat the insurgents in that country. Unfortunately, according to that report, the best ratio of troops to population, in a counter-insurgency operation like this one, is 20 per 1,000 civilians. But since Iraq has a population of 26 million people, that would mean that the United States would need to add at least 250,000 troops to the current 140,000 military personnel already in Iraq.

It's been a few years since I took a math class, but that seems like a few more than the twenty thousand troops Bush wants to send.

In fact, as Terry Jones (the ex-Monty Python member) pointed out, America has spent one million dollars per dead Iraqi. Strangely enough, it might have been more cost-effective to actually drop bales of money from planes to squash the insurgents.

But Congress has the power. Unlike what the nay-sayers want you to believe, Teddy Kennedy is correct. Congress has every right to tell Bush how to spend the money that they give him. In fact, they've done it over and over again.

It's time for Congress to start treating Bush like a two-year-old. If he won't pay attention to the rules, they need to take his toys away.