Satire of the day

The White House's revised Bill of Rights

Senate Republicans vote against accountability

In an 8-7 vote split along party lines the Senate Intelligence Committee decided not to investigate the White House's NSA surveillance program, and instead will create an oversight subcommittee comprised of 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats, all but assuring that the extent to which our 4th Amendment rights have been violated by the President's authorization of surveillance outside the scope of the FISA courts will remain a mystery to the public.

This is an outrage. And at this point, to say such almost seems trite since there are so many. Glenn Greenwald points out how truly craven it was for Republicans like Chuck Hagel to vote for this when they had previously expressed concern over the legality of the program.

I'm finding it hard to view these politicians as anything but enemies of democracy, despite having Sydney Hooke's exhortation to do otherwise in the back of my mind. It is an insult for these politicians to talk as if they are for one thing, and then act as if they are for another. It makes a mockery of democracy.

This is an insult to the people whom these politicians are supposed to represent the interests of. It is not their job to protect the President from accountability. Are there no men of conscience left in the Republican Party? Are there no men or women willing to stand against the President on principle? The 4th Amendment rights of the entire nation may have been violated, yet these Senators can't be bothered to call for an investigation.

How can the true constituents of these Senators tolerate them when they do not have the backbone that is necessary to speak for the people they were elected to represent?

Blogger's Note - The comments section of the Greenwald post are worth looking at, as several of the commenters identify the problems that allow this sort of activity to occur unchecked.

No time for blogging

I'll be busy the remainder of the week, and I'm not certain whether or not I'll have any time for blogging, so here is a link to the Secular Web's library. There is a lot of good stuff there.

Strange visitor from the Dark Ages gets elected to South Dakota state senate

"A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life." - South Dakota Republican state senator Bill Napoli explaining under what circumstances he'd allow a rape victim to get an abortion (via Shakespeare's Sister)

This is not about state's rights. If the Religious Right could ban abortion at the federal level they'd be more than willing to overstep state's rights, as they were in the Terry Schiavo case. What it is about is the desire to force their religious morality on everyone else. Napoli reflects a mindset where a woman is the property of her husband, where her body is not under her own control. It is no coincedence that women were not able to achieve an equal place in society until they were able to achieve reproductive freedom. This man, and this law, is reactionary in the worst sense of the word. It is an attempt to turn back the clock on a woman's right to control her own reproductive fate.

Link restoration

I've added The Economist back to the Links section since the website now offers a Day Pass feature similar to the one at Salon which allows you access to Premium content after viewing a brief add. The Economist is one of the premier news magazines in the world, so I recommend taking advantage of this feature.

How much does it cost to fight and defend ourselves from terrorists?

They blow themselves up, hide in caves, steal planes with boxcutters and fly them into buildings. Does it really take Cold War level military spending to protect ourselves from them? Just look at some of these figures. In 2005 the U.S. accounted for 43% of the word's total military spending; the next highest nation, China, accounted for 6%. If the hundreds of billions dollars we already spend on military can not stop a terrorist attack, why will another hundred billion make a difference?

Isn't this a problem of approach rather than resources? And isn't it clear that our approach is not working? The "axis of evil" is more dangerous today than it was in 2003. Muslim world opinion of the United States is less favorable today than it was in 2001. Radical Islamic anger over American military prescence in the Middle East has been stoked by the invasion of Iraq, which has turned a nation that did not hosts terrorists prior to the invasion into the terrorist capital of the world. Global terrorist activity has increased. Nuclear proliferation has increased and the United States itself has helped weaken the Non-Proliferation treaty. We have undone decades of diplomacy and earned the scorn of our allies for our unilateralism and abandonment of the human rights standards of the Geneva Convention and international law.

Our approach to terrorism seems the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire.

Missouri considers resolution to establish Republic of Gilead

Missouri state legislators are considering passing a resolution making Christianity the official majority religion of the state in order to "protect the majority's right to express their religious beliefs."

Now let me translate that for you:

Missouri state legislators are considering passing a resolution making Christianity the official majority religion of the state in order to "allow the Christian Right to impose their morality on everyone else."

From the Americans United for Separation of Church and State blog

Missouri’s Res. 13, however, reflects exactly what this nation’s Religious Right wants – a country where its extreme agenda is advanced by government. That’s why so many Religious Right activists loathe the First Amendment and perpetually claim that it contains no clause separating government and religion. These folks want laws that ban reproductive rights, stifle advancement of civil rights for gays and allow public school teachers to lead their students in Christian prayer, Bible readings and other religious activities.

The resolution is also reflective of the Religious Right’s warped understanding of democracy and the U.S. Constitution. The Missouri resolution states that America’s Founding Fathers envisioned our nation’s governing document as setting up a Christian nation. TV preachers Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a host of other Religious Right pundits have asserted similar claims for years.

The truth is that the nation’s Constitution was not based on sectarian principles. It is a secular document created by men who were witness to the destruction wrought by the union of religion and government in Europe and America’s early colonies. Nowhere does the word “God” appear in the Constitution. Founding Father and author of the First Amendment James Madison did not, regardless of the Missouri lawmakers’ puffery, envision an American theocracy.

In 1823, Madison wrote, “The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt. and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both….”

Reality, however, seems of no concern to some Missouri lawmakers or opportunistic Religious Right operatives who are bent on enforcing their religious strictures on the entire nation.

Situational science

"Drat! These pesky scientific facts won't line up behind my beliefs!"

"Then challenge them Steve!"

Doonesbury on the White House's approach to science.

Quote of the day

So many of the principles to which our country has, by consensus, adhered for decades, through Republican and Democratic Administrations, are being attacked and destroyed by this Administration. This process is inexorably changing the kind of country we are and the system of government under which we live. That is the very definition of "radical," and that term applies to this Administration as much as it applies to anything.

- Glenn Greenwald commenting on the Bush administration's efforts to prosecute journalists under espionage laws

The administration's plans to prosecute journalists under the Espionage Act represents an attack on the fundamental concept of democracy itself. The administration considers the press, whose job is to assure that the public has "knowledge ... of the characters and conduct of their rulers" which is essential to the presevation of liberty, as enemy spies. This is an attack on the public's right to know, on the right to hold leaders accountable for their actions.

If the press is an enemy spy, and the press is the public watchdog, that makes us, We the People, the enemy.

Zeno's motion paradoxes and evolutionary theory

In the comments to my History of life entry I made reference to Zeno's motion paradox(es).

Zeno, a 5th century BCE Greek philosopher, believed that motion (change) was an illusion, and he proposed several similar thought experiments to demonstrate this view. For the sake of brevity, we'll look at just one: Achilles and the tortoise.

In the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, we imagine the Greek hero Achilles in a footrace with the plodding reptile. Because he is so fast a runner, Achilles graciously allows the tortoise a head start of a hundred feet. If we suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed (one very fast and one very slow), then after some finite time, Achilles will have run a hundred feet, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point; during this time, the tortoise has "run" a (much shorter) distance, say one foot. It will then take Achilles some further period of time to run that distance, during which the tortoise will advance farther; and then another period of time to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has farther to go. Therefore, Zeno says, swift Achilles can never overtake the tortoise. Thus, while common sense and common experience would hold that one runner can catch another, according to the above argument, he cannot; this is the paradox.

Zeno is obviously wrong, as anyone can see that Achilles will in fact overtake the tortoise at some point if he is running faster, but it resisted mathematical refutation until Cantor came up with his theory of tranfinites in the late 19th century. What people had a difficult time accepting was that an infinite number of distances could converge on a finite sum (1.1, 1.11, 1.111 .... 2).

So what does this have to do with evolution? Hopefully, the point will have already presented itself, because I find myself stumbling to articulate it, but I'll try anyway.

In The Ancestor's Tale, Dawkins called our difficulty to conceptualize non-discrete categories as the 'Tyranny of a Discontinuous Mind'. For example, its easy for us to recognize the difference between reptiles and mammals, but hard for us to categorize species that were transitional. If we were to formulate an evolutionary version of Zeno's paradox we might ask: "at what point did a reptile give birth to a mammal?"

The answer is: never. This may seem counter-intutive, but only if you look at it from a discontinuous perspective. The chain of individuals that connect a mammal to a reptile ancestor consists of a continuous stretch of lives where each succesive generation is only slightly different than the previous one, so that if you look at any one point in the chain you will not be able to discern much of a difference between two generations. But the effects of these changes are cumulative, so if you compare far ends of the chain you can easily see the difference.

And while we're speaking about evolutionary change, one should check out this post at Carl Zimmer's blog about the tree of life that has been constructed as a result of genome sequencing. The tree is amazing in that it shows just how genetically similar we animals are relative to exhibited biological diversity on the planet.

Budget insanity

From the New York Times

President Bush's budget would increase the federal deficit by $35 billion this year and by more than $1.2 trillion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office reported on Friday.

The nonpartisan budget office said that Mr. Bush's tax-cutting proposals would cost about $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years and that his proposals to partly privatize Social Security would cost about $312 billion during that period.

And here's the best part

The optimistic outlook also assumes that Congress freezes or cuts the vast majority of discretionary government programs outside of military and domestic security ones.

See how that works? Run up a huge deficit so that you can sacrifice government programs which help people (worker protection, food safety, education, environmental protections, science research, "community development block grants, low-income housing, child-support enforcement against deadbeat fathers and scores of other programs with support in Congress.") at the altar of the military-industrial complex.

Intellectual honesty watch

The AP story which stated that President Bush was briefed that the New Orleans levees might breech has now been corrected, with the AP clarifying that the video shows that Bush was warned about "topping" but not a breech.

Ok, so does this take the President off the hook? Not quite. From my response at The Green Knight (I took the liberty of correcting my grammar)

To state that no one could anticipate the breech of the levees is on its face an absurd claim. There is no excuse for the President not knowing that a Category 5 hurricane (what they would have been preparing for) aproaching New Orleans would not only possibly breech the levees, but would PROBABLY breech them.

And in regards to the video, it doesn't really matter whether it said topped or breeched. The end result is flooding, which is what The President was trying to excuse FEMA's lack of preparedness for.

Update - Media Matters demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the President's statement that no one could have anticipated the breech of the levees.

Government of the people, for the people, by the people?

Is our government for the people, or for corporations, industry, and lobbyists?

Two news stories that raise this question

Story 1

Preliminary investigations into the disaster at West Virginia's Sago Mine are turning up serious questions—among them whether the federal government will mount an aggressive drive for the truth about the January 2 disaster, in which 12 coal miners were killed.

A heated political clash at a congressional hearing on mine safety Thursday suggests that the leadership necessary for an all-out effort is unlikely to come from the U.S. Congress or the Bush administration.

Story 2

Hundreds of warnings on food labels could vanish under a measure moving toward approval in the House.

The bill would stop states from adding warnings that are different from federal rules. States currently add hundreds of extra warnings, indicating the presence of arsenic in water, mercury in fish, alcohol in candy, pesticides in vegetables and more.

"This legislation could overturn 200 state laws -- laws that the American people rely on every day to ensure the safety of the food they eat," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said Thursday during House debate on the bill.

The food industry wants consistent warnings across state lines to reduce the cost of making many different labels. The industry has attracted broad support in the House, where a majority is co-sponsoring the bill.

And two book excerpts.

From Fast Food Nation (2002)

[I]t is a sad but undeniable fact that for the past two decades the right wing of the Republican Party has worked closely with the fast food industry and the meatpacking industry to oppose food safety laws, worker safety laws, and increases in the minimum wage. One of President George W. Bush's first acts in office was to rescind a new OSHA ergonomics standard that would have protected millions of workers from cumulative trauma injuries. The National Restaurant Association and the American Meat Institute applauded the move. The newly appointed chairman of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, which oversees all legislation pertaining to OSHA, is Representative Charles Norwood, a Republican from Georgia. During the 1990's Norwood sponsored legislation that would have prevented OSHA from inspecting unsafe workplaces or fining negligent employers. He has publicly suggested that some workers may actually be getting their repetitive stress injuries from skiing and playing too much tennis, not from their jobs.

One of the Bush administration's first food safety decisions was to stop testing the National School Lunch Program's ground beef for Salmonella. The meatpacking industry's lobbyists were delighted; they had worked hard to end the testing, which the industry considered expensive, inconvenient, and unnecesary. But consumer groups were outraged. In the ten months that the USDA had been testing ground beef intended for schoolchildren, roughly 5 million pounds were rejected because of Salmonella contamination. Three days after it was announced Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman said that she'd never authorized the new policy, reversed course, and promised that the school lunch program's Salmonella testing would continue.*

From Arrogant Capital (1994)

Almost before it started, Clinton's administration got in trouble for being too close to lobbyists, insiders, and power brokers. But attention has focused not only on these relations, but on the President's willingness to make deals with business and financial lobbies even more quickly than with labor, environmental, and minority groups. Changes like these tell the real story of the transition from "Old Democrat" to "New Democrat." What Clinton has done is to shift his party from so-called interest-group liberalism to "interest-group centrism" - away from the pro-spending liberal-type lobbies that represented people (labor, seniors, minorities, and urban) to a more upscale centrist (or center-right) group that represents money (multinational business, banks, investment firms, trial lawyers, trade interests, super-lobbyists, investors, the bond market, and so on). In short, the new power structure of special interest-group centrism. This is the ultimate triumph of Washington's interest-group ascendency: the party of the people can no longer be the party of the people.

And

Theoretically, a member of Congress represents a chunk of Missouri or Connecticut, and these voters alone get his or her mailings, satellite television feeds, and weekend visits: he or she is their representative. But the reality of what the average senator or congressman represents is a tailored slice of interest-group Washington: the party caucus or national committee, some contributors and polictical action committees, and a collection of think tanks and coalitions, associations, corporations, and unions. Grassroots party loyalty being so loose, 75 percent to 85 percent of senators and congressmen can use the right combination of interest-group backing to entrench themselves. to ordinary voters, representative government has become a shell - and behind it, only the influentials are truly represented.

Meanwhile, there is a bipartisan resistance in Congress against taking the steps necessary to ensure that our elected officals can not be bought and sold.

*Schlosser preceded this paragraph by pointing out that Democrats had also been guilty of this (although to a lesser extent), citing Clinton's ties to agribusiness and the Tyson family, and the FDA's slack efforts to investigate the safety of biotech foods and keep cattle remains out of cattle feed during Clinton's administration.

Will history remember George W. Bush as the President who stood for torture?

It damn well should.

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison.

Thing is, the administration lawyers are right, since an amendment was attached to McCain's bill that would not allow Gitmo prisoners to challenge their treatment in court.

And don't think my contempt is only directed at President Bush, I am also disgusted with every member of Congress who approved of this legislation, including John McCain.

This is the sort of person the administration gets its advice from

Michael Ledeen, the only full time foreign policy advisor that Karl Rove has employed, thinks we should go to war with France and Germany. Seriously.

Think about this for a moment. A man who has influence with the White House, who as a fellow at AEI had a great deal to do with setting policy in Iraq, wants to divide the world into 1984 like warring factions.

That article is almost a year old, but its the first time I've seen it.

States make it more difficult for poor people to not get pregnant

Apparently, telling people "God doesn't want you to have sex" is not an effective means of cutting the rate of unintended pregnancies.

From the Washington Post

At a time when policymakers have made reducing unintended pregnancies a national priority, 33 states have made it more difficult or more expensive for poor women and teenagers to obtain contraceptives and related medical services, according to an analysis released yesterday by the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute.

From 1994 to 2001, many states cut funds for family planning, enacted laws restricting access to birth control and placed tight controls on sex education, said the institute, a privately funded research group that focuses on sexual health and family issues.

The statewide trends help explain why more than half of the 6 million pregnancies in the United States each year are unintended and offer clues for tackling problems associated with teenage pregnancy and abortion, said researchers who specialize in the field.

Quote of the day

"A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth versus Bush

From the National Journal, more evidence of the Bush administration lying the country into war with Iraq (via the Left Coaster)

Lie 1

The first report, delivered to Bush in early October 2002, was a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that discussed whether Saddam's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon.

Among other things, the report stated that the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons," a view disagreeing with that of other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which believed that the tubes were intended for a nuclear bomb.

The disclosure that Bush was informed of the DOE and State dissents is the first evidence that the president himself knew of the sharp debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither the president nor the vice president told the public about the disagreement among the agencies.

Lie 2

The second classified report, delivered to Bush in early January 2003, was also a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, this one focusing on whether Saddam would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists.

The report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States -- except if "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault, according to records and sources.

The single dissent in the report again came from State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, which believed that the Iraqi leader was "unlikely to conduct clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland even if [his] regime's demise is imminent" as the result of a U.S. invasion.

On at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, according to the same records and sources, the president was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States.

However, in the months leading up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and Cabinet members repeatedly asserted that Saddam was likely to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States or to provide such weapons to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group.

Resolved: George W. Bush worst president in American history.

See here for 50 reasons why. And I must say, a cursory glance shows that list to be not nearly complete. Here are some more reasons that I would add to it (which still does not make the list comprehensive):

- Pervasive nature of Bush's assault on environmental laws

- Gitmo

- Eroding church/state seperation

- Doubling the amount of lobbysts in Washington

- Crony capitalism

- Manipulation of science

- Pervasive lying

- Assault on the 4th estate

- Government secrecy

- Questions regarding 2000 election

- Questions regarding 2004 election

- Enron

Et cetera

And here's the latest case of Bush putting crony capitalism ahead of people's lives.

In its drive to foster a more cooperative relationship with mining companies, the Bush administration has decreased major fines for safety violations since 2001, and in nearly half the cases, it has not collected the fines, according to a data analysis by The New York Times.

Federal records also show that in the last two years the federal mine safety agency has failed to hand over any delinquent cases to the Treasury Department for further collection efforts, as is supposed to occur after 180 days.

With the deaths of 24 miners in accidents in 2006, the enforcement record of the Mine Safety and Health Administration has come under sharp scrutiny, and the agency is likely to face tough questions about its performance at a Senate oversight hearing on Thursday.

"The Bush administration ushered in this desire to develop cooperative ties between regulators and the mining industry," said Tony Oppegard, a top official at the agency in the Clinton administration. "Safety has certainly suffered as a result."

Bush gets stumped by Kansas student

This guy is our President. I was actually embarrased for him, that is, until I read the rest of the transcript and saw that he answered with an untruth.

Bush, man of integrity

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." - George W. Bush, four days after being briefed about the possibility of Katrina breaching the levees.

From the AP

Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility — and Bush was worried too.

And

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

Well, I for one sure feel safe with this man at the helm. Yes sir. If another terrorist attack is attempted, I've got full confidence in President Bush to handle it.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby tatoos 'Guilty' on his forehead

From here (Via The Cunning Realist)

Libby's lawyers hinted in court filings last week that memory loss will be "central themes" of Libby's defense. Libby's lawyers write: "...any misstatements he made during his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony were not intentional, but rather the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory."

Libby's lawyers say that, during Libby's hectic days handling sensitive national-security matters, "it is understandable that he may have forgotten or misremembered relatively less significant events. Such relatively less important events include alleged snippets of conversations about Valerie Plame Wilson's employment status."

Disheartening figure of the day

Via the Daou Report

"Almost 90% [of U.S. troops in Iraq] think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11" - Zogby International

How can 85% (the actual number, Zogby rounded up) of the troops not know that Saddam had no role in 9/11? They are putting their lives on the line for something that, as Peter Daou put it, "simply isn't true."

Something is very wrong here.

America: ignorant

Only 25% of Americans can name more than one of the 1st Amendment freedoms, and only .1% of Americans can name all five, according to a recent telephone survey. And recall that another study found that 36% of highschool students thought newspapers should have to get government approval before publishing a story.

We really need some sort of class where students learn about the Constitution.

*Blogger's Note - I had written .001%, stupidly. I would like to think I would have corrected this on my own, but a commenter brought it to my attention.

Quote of the day

"In the past, a soldier caught waterboarding a detainee was subject to a court martial. These days, the defense secretary sanctions it." - Andrew Sullivan

The Bhopal disaster

I'm feeling lazy, so I'll try to make this point concisely.

In 1984 forty tons of methyl isocyanate was accidentally leaked from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India which resulted in the death of tens of thousands of people and the injury of hundreds of thousands. The accident was the result of gross negligence on the part of the plant, having failed to take virtually any necessary safety precautions. Yet little in the way of compensation has reached the victims of this travesty; additionally, Bhopal is still contaminated.

The Bhopal disaster is what could happen in the United States if the safety and environmental regulations that we have were not in place.

Union Carbide, which contributed to Bush's campaign funds, would indeed like to be deregulated. And when Bush became President, one of the first things he did was to ask polluting industries which rules they would like to not follow, and then to proceed to try and eliminate or roll-back those rules.

Do you think this is fear-mongering on my part? If so, then read this.

Update for the New American Newspeak Dictionary

Today's addition to the New American Newspeak Dictionary is:

Luntzspeak: environmental Newspeak crafted by pollster Frank Luntz

Quote of the day

"Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man." - Lewis Lapham, on reading the Conyer's report on the way in which the American public was sold a war in Iraq

Broken Democracy Watch

In a democratic society, should the following ever be the case? From Yahoo

While technically all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for grabs in November, handicappers expect a mere 33 to be competitive, in part because many incumbents already have picked the voters they hope will return them to office.

Across the country, lawmakers will run for re-election in bizarrely shaped congressional districts carefully drawn to include voters who support them and exclude those who don't.

Case in point

Allright, I just got done saying the Bush administration should not be trusted on matters relating to the environment. So guess what I came across in today's Washington Post ... that's right, an article about the Bush administration distorting science in favor of generating profit for industry.

From the report

If fire ravages a national forest, as happened here in southwest Oregon when the Biscuit fire torched a half-million acres four years ago, the Bush administration believes loggers should move in quickly, cut marketable trees that remain and replant a healthy forest.

"We must quickly restore the areas that have been damaged by fire," President Bush said in Oregon four years ago after touring damage from the Biscuit fire. He called it "common sense."

Common sense, though, may not always be sound science. An Oregon State University study has raised an extraordinary ruckus in the Pacific Northwest this winter by saying that logging burned forests does not make much sense.

Logging after the Biscuit fire, the study found, has harmed forest recovery and increased fire risk. What the short study did not say -- but what many critics of the Bush administration are reading into it -- is that the White House has ignored science to please the timber industry. The study is consistent with research findings from around the world that have documented how salvage logging can strip burned forests of the biological diversity that fire and natural recovery help protect.

The study also questions the scientific rationale behind a bill pending in Congress that would ease procedures for post-fire logging in federal forests. This, in turn, has annoyed the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who has received far more campaign money from the forest products industry than from any other source, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

See, it would be one thing to look at the available evidence, admit that post-fire logging is not in the best interests of the forrest, but then decide that economic needs outweighed the benefit of allowing the forest to recover naturally. One may or may not agree with that choice, but that approach allows for an honest debate. Yet, that is now how the Bush administration operates. No. Instead we are told that an action that will benefit the timber industries that have contributed campaign money to Bush and Rep. Walden is being done in the interest of protecting the forests. That is dishonest and insulting, as the purpose of this approach is to side step discussion by tricking the public into agreeing to these acts.

But don't take my word for it, take a look at the advice that pollster Frank Luntz gave to Republicans about how to sell their environmental policy to the public.* Do numbers 4 and 8 sound familiar?

*I'd like to point out the section where Luntz writes about Michael Fumento exposing the legal holes in Erin Brokovitch's case. That's this Michael Fumento and this legal case.

DuPont to dump treated wastewater

I would be nervous if I was in any way dependent on the water of the Delaware River. Because:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won't oppose the U.S. Department of Defense and DuPont Co.'s plan to dump a wastewater byproduct of a deadly nerve agent into the Delaware River.

The agency said it's assured of a safe treatment for up to 4 million gallons of caustic wastewater created in the treatment for VX, a chemical weapon with a pinhead-size potency to kill a human. DuPont is treating VX for disposal at its Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana.

The agent, once neutralized, would be shipped to DuPont's Chambers Works plant in Deepwater, N.J., for discharge into the river.

I would be concerned for several reasons:
1. Its DuPont. They have a history of environmental disregard, and a history of trying to hide and spin the results of said environmental disregard.
2. Its the Bush administration. The Bush administration has a history of lax enforcement of environmental regulations.

Does this mean that the treated water won't be safe? No, it does not. Frankly, I know nothing about VX and the cleanup process; it could be the case that the new procedure developed by DuPont will render the water perfectly safe. But DuPont and the Bush administration have not acted in a manner that should give anyone the peace of mind to trust them. The people whose lives might be affected by this decision should be extremely weary, and should definitely look to inform themselves on this issue.

Remember, this is an administration that has sought to lower the value of a human life.

Bagram: forgotten legal black hole

Is this the conduct of a nation that stands for the rule of law?

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

The history of life

The universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old. Matter and energy can not be created or destroyed - they can only change forms or convert from one to another.

By implication, that means you are 13.7 bilion years old. Or more precisely, the matter that comprises your body has existed, in some form or other, for 13.7 billion years old. This matter is constantly being recyled and replaced with new matter, matter that is also 13.7 billion years old. What your age represents is the length of time that the atomic pattern that is the blueprint of your being has been in the world.

At the start of the universe the only elements that existed were hydrogen and helium. All the other elements, including the organic elements that are the building blocks of life on Earth, were produced inside of stars. This means that at some point, the carbon and nitrogen and oxygen that is the bulk of your body (excluding hydrogen) was formed billions of years ago inside of a star by the process of nucleosynthesis. As Carl Sagan liked to muse, we are quite literally made of star dust.

The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. One billion years later, evidence of life first emerged. There currently is no accepted theory as to how life began, but I suspect time will bare out the finding that life began with some sort of autocatalytic process where proteins that filled the oceans began to self-replicate. If this turns out to be correct, this means we are the Earth come alive.

Speculation aside, you represent an unbroken chain of life stretching back to the time when life first appeared. It took 3.5 billion years of evolution to arive at you. You represent genes that have traveled billions of years, changing and evolving along the way, to arrive in combination at the production of you.

All life on Earth shares as a common ancestor that first life form that rose in the sea. That means you are related to every living thing on the planet. It is a favorite habit of Creationists to hang their argument of personal incredulity upon the notion that we evolved from monkeys (we didn't, we share a common simian ancestor with them) but I've never understood this, because if you're going to make such an argument (which is a logical error, anyways) one can find much more outrageous claims from evolutionary theory. Yet these claims are true.

The common ancestor of all multi-celled animals was probably something resembling a sea sponge. Yes, one of your great........great grandparents may have been a sponge. Strange but true.

Approximately 440 million years ago one of your grandparents was swimming in the ocean as a fish. Thankfully for you, he managed to not get eaten before reproducing and passing on the genes that would eventually become you along their billion years journey.

One hundred millions later - 340 million years ago - those genes had evolved and brought your ancestor out of the sea. This ancestor was some sort of amphibian.

Another hundred million years marked a tough time for your ancestor, as at the end of the Permian there was a mass extinction in which 90 - 95 % of life on Earth was wiped out. This grandparent was now a mammal-like reptile, probably something close to a therapsid. If he hadn't managed to survive the greatest extinction in Earth's history, you would not be here today.

More time passes. Its the age of dinosaurs. Your ancestor is now a small, shrew-like mammal. And around 65 million years ago, he manages to survive a meteorite strike that was so cataclysmic that 85% of all life went extinct. According to Richard Dawkins, the sound of the collision would have been so thundering that most life on the planet would have been struck deaf. Your possibly deaf, possibly blind, possibly burned ancestor dodged a proverbial bullet, fortunately.

This great .... great grandparent of yours survived and its descendents proceeded to evolve, slowly and slightly, so slowly and slightly that our minds, which have a habit of trying to view the world in discrete categories, have a difficult time grasping how such changes could ever occur. But occur they did, and around 40 million years ago - 25 million years after the great escape of your other ancestor - your ancestor was now swinging from a tree. He was something similar to a monkey.

It took another 40 million years of evolution to get from him to you. That's 40 million more years of your direct predecessors managing to win the game of life and successfully pass on their genetic material to the next generation.

If you think this is remotely interesting, then check out The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. Its written as a backwards pilgrimage through time, with humans being joined along the way at rendevous points in history by other living organisms where they share a common ancestor (concestor) with us.

Working for change

In the post I did on our broken democracy I wrote the following in regards to what needed to be done in order to affect change.

I expect it will take the people making a lot of noise. The press has failed us in this matter, so firstly pressure needs to be put on media outlets to cover this issue. This can probably be accomplished at the local level more efficiently than at the national. After that, I'm not sure. But becoming aware of the problem is the first step.

Such a plan has been formulated, it appears. The plan is to get natives of Kansas to write letters to their local papers pressuring the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Patrick Roberts (R- Kan), to call for an investigation of the NSA surveillance program. I have my doubts about whether or not Roberts can be swayed to deviate from his history of partisan protection of the Bush administration, but I welcome the effort.

And for added fun, here is Glenn kicking me in the ass for being overly pessimistic. Which kind of got under my skin, so I think I'm going to have to write the best darned letter to the editor that our local paper has ever seen.

Art of the Day

Melancholy (1891) - Edvard Munch

Yeah, I'm in a bad mood (unrelated to politics, in case one was inclined to speculate.)

Despicable argumentation

These pinheads running around going, "Get out of Iraq now," don't know what they're talking about. These are the same people before Hitler invaded in World War II that were saying, "Ah, he's not such a bad guy." They don't get it. - Bill O'Reilly, Nov. 30 2005

Now, it's a small little thing, but I picked up on it, because here is the essential problem in Iraq. There are so many nuts in the country -- so many crazies -- that we can't control them. And I don't -- we're never gonna be able to control them. So the only solution to this is to hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible. Because we just can't control these crazy people. This is all over the place. And that was the big mistake about America: They didn't -- it was the crazy-people underestimation. We did not know how to deal with them -- still don't. But they're just all over the place. - Bill O'Reilly, Feb. 20 2006

Cognitive dissonance much Bill? Hm? See, maybe those people who thought we should withdraw from Iraq weren't like apologists for Hitler after all, or is it that they are but you are not?Does this suggest anything to you? Do you think maybe you should not be so cavalier about denigrating the character of people whom you disagree with in the future?

Quote of the day

Via Kevin Drum, Michael Shermer on the sentencing of David Irving for Holocaust denial.

Austria's treatment of Irving as a political dissident should offend both the people who defend the rights of political cartoonists to express their opinion of Islamic terrorists and the civil libertarians who leaped to the defense of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill when he exercised his right to call the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns." Why doesn't it? Why aren't freedom lovers everywhere offended by Irving's court conviction?

Freedom is a principle that must be applied indiscriminately. We have to defend Irving in order to defend ourselves. Once the laws are in place to jail dissidents of Holocaust history, what's to stop such laws from being applied to dissenters of religious or political histories, or to skepticism of any sort that deviates from the accepted canon?

Our President, the King

From Reason

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says Congress approved the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretaps when it authorized a military response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. He also has said President Bush later decided not to ask for congressional approval of the surveillance program (approval he supposedly already had) because Congress probably would have said no (even though, by Gonzales' account, it already had said yes).

Now the Bush administration is pursuing legislation suggested by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) that would provide the congressional blessing it says it always had yet never sought. But since the president apparently thinks he has unilateral authority to do whatever he deems necessary to prevent terrorism, any law that aims to regulate his conduct in this area may not accomplish much.

Conclusion

The administration's defense of the NSA's wiretaps suggests the PATRIOT Act's electronic surveillance provisions are superfluous at best. And if Bush thinks he has the authority to quietly disregard statutory restrictions on wiretaps, how can we be sure his administration is punctiliously following the legal requirements for seizing records or conducting physical searches? The president's secret exercise of undefined powers renders "clear red lines" invisible.

Reminder

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."

This is one of the grieavances against King George III listed in the Declaration of Independence.

Broken democracy

The principle foundation of a democracy is that the people are governed by their consent, meaning that they have some recourse by which to remove a government that they no longer find exceptable. In the American system, that opportunity comes about via periodic elections.

Yet, here the '06 elections are fast approaching, and we have still not had any national dialogue about our flawed electronic voting system or the questionable nature of the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. Then there is the matter of gerrymandered districts which have been redistricted in such a way as to all but fix the outcome of the election. On top of that, we have the wholesale of our democracy where our elected officals are more beholden to the people who give them money than they are to the people whom they are supposed to represent. And to make it worse, we have a press that fails to deliver "the information they need to be free and self-governing."

Do people realize the implications? We give our consent to be governed by the process of voting. If our vote does not count, then we have not given our consent. To be governed without consent, without recourse to remove unwanted officials, is the very defintion of tyranny. Obviously, we're not living under a system of tyranny at the moment, although perhaps it could be said America "leans in that direction." But the aforementioned problems should give us cause for concern, and steps should be taken to remedy the problem before it gets any worse.

What is to be done? I expect it will take the people making a lot of noise. The press has failed us in this matter, so firstly pressure needs to be put on media outlets to cover this issue. This can probably be accomplished at the local level more efficiently than at the national. After that, I'm not sure. But becoming aware of the problem is the first step.

Superman could really exist

Reductio ad absurdum:

is a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable. It is a style of reasoning that has been employed throughout the history of mathematics and philosophy from classical antiquity onwards.

1.God is Omnipotent.
2. Anything is possible for God.
3. Thus, God can will anything to exist.
4. Superman could exist.

Thesis: The attribute "omnipotence" is incompatible with the known physics of the universe.

Blogger's Note - I was in a rush when I first posted this and did not get to include the following commentary. I add it now.

I've often heard it said that positive atheism is an unjustifiable philosophical position because one can not prove with certainty that God can not (or does not) exist and that one must rest such a belief on faith alone, thus putting the atheist on equal grounds with the theist . Yet if you claim Superman can not exist no one will tell you that you are making a faith based decision regarding the existance of Superman. To admit one can not exist while claiming the other can is a form of special pleading, as there is no reason why the rules of physics should apply to one and not the other. If one maintains that it is possible for God to exist, it is of equal probability for Superman, or any other absurdity, to exist. And if you do that, the entire edifice of what we call knowledge comes crumbling down.

"Democracy dies behind closed doors"

From the New York Times

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

Its killing me, absolutely killing me, to see the democratic institutions of this country slipping away like grains of sand falling through an hour glass. A functioning democracy is predicated on the notion that the public has the information neccesary to allow them to fulfill their civic duties, yet the public is now being denied access to information at an unprecedented rate.

Since President Bush took office the rate of classification has increased by 75% (as of March 2005) and this is part of a larger pattern of restricting access to information, regardless of whether its classified or not.

How can the public hold its representatives accountable for their actions if the public does not know what they are? How can citizens participate in the democratic process if they do not know what is going on?

Reminder to Austria (and Western Europe)

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

No nation that is party to that declaration has any business criminalizing thought.

Quote of the day

"If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America--even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It's a transformative issue." - Alberto J. Mora

The creeping leader cult

The problem is partly a matter of style. Mr Barnes gushes over his “insurgent leader”—and then supports his gushing tributes with even more gushing tributes from Mr Bush's staff, as if they meant something. But a problem of style rapidly becomes a problem of substance. The political sage of the Weekly Standard does not go so far, say, as North Korean Communist hacks when they praise Kim Jong Il as a hero for the ages. Mr Barnes is at least open to doubt. But he leans in that direction. - The Economist

The fact that The Economist saw fit to state that a book on our President written by a leading figure of the conservative movement leans in the direction of hero-worship that is demonstrated for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is symptomatic of a growing problem in America, which is thus: there is a significant portion of the population who in the aftermath of 9/11 are now willing to give deference to a central authority figure. This is troubling, as the foundation of our country was based on the rejection of that very principle.

For instance:

Last week’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference signaled the transformation of American conservatism into brownshirtism. A former Justice Department official named Viet Dinh got a standing ovation when he told the CPAC audience that the rule of law mustn’t get in the way of President Bush protecting Americans from Osama bin Laden.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr, who led the House impeachment of President Bill Clinton, reminded the CPAC audience that our first loyalty is to the US Constitution, not to a leader. The question, Barr said, is not one of disloyalty to Bush, but whether America "will remain a nation subject to, and governed by, the rule of law or the whim of men."

The CPAC audience answered that they preferred to be governed by Bush. According to Dana Milbanks, a member of the CPAC audience named Richard Sorcinelli loudly booed Barr, declaring: "I can’t believe I’m in a conservative hall listening to him say Bush is off course trying to defend the United States." A woman in the audience told Barr that the Constitution placed Bush above the law and above non-elected federal judges.

Glenn Greenwald in his work at Unclaimed Territory has observed that there is a cultish nature to much of the defense that is being given for the Bush administration's grabs at extraConstitutional power, where self-styled conservatives are willing to cannibalize (metaphorically speaking) any conservative who is not willing to jettison his conservative principles in deference to George Bush (see here and here.) I believe Dave Neiwert correctly pointed out that the cult of Bush was a product of the movement, not vice versa. Afterall, Bush was chosen to be a Presidential candidate because his name could get him elected and because his family connections could raise large sums of campaign funds, not because he was any kind of a figure within the conservative movement - in essence, he was a viewed as a vessel that could be used to deliver a Presidential victory for the movement.

Neiwert comes to the conclusion that what we are seeing is the birth of a political religion.

Using this model to frame the discussion, I think what we can readily see is that -- as with pseudo-fascism -- the conservative movement is still in a somewhat nascent stage as a political religion. The examples of more mature religions provide us with a fairly clear picture of where it's headed, however.

And it won't necessarily be under the leadership of George W. Bush. The discrete conservative movement is structured such that it needs a "charismatic" figure at its head; it's essentially a psychological imperative for this kind of belief system.

So if the leader it elevates happens not, in fact, to actually be charismatic, as Bush really is not, then the movement will tailor its reality to make him so. True Believers -- having been steadily propagandized with Fox News and RNC talking points about Bush's superior character -- now really do see Bush as a charismatic figure, which leaves most non-believers shaking their heads.

But he is in essence disposable, an empty suit filled by the psychological needs of the movement he leads. He's sort of like a Fraternity President on steroids: Bush's presidency is all about popularity, not policy. He's a figurehead, a blank slate upon which the movement's followers can project their own notions of what a good president is about. And when his term is up, the movement will create a new "charismatic" leader.

And here's an example of where such a religion might one day take us.

Even the Devil deserves his say

It is not too much to require that what the wisest of mankind, those who are best entitled to trust their own judgment, find necessary to warrant their relying on it, should be submitted to by that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals, called the public. The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a "devil's advocate." The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honours, until all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed. If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

David Irving is a Holocaust denier. He's likely a racist, his audience most certainly is, his work is error ridden, and in a few days he will be going on trial in Austria for his Holocaust denial, a crime in Austria that is punishable by up to ten years in prison.

This is unacceptable. Irving has not done anything other than put forth the argument that standard history of the Holocaust is wrong. Whatever Irving's motivations are, or whether or not he's right, there is no excuse for criminalizing thought. No law can bade a man to betray his conscience, yet that is exactly what a law prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust does. All knowledge must be subject to challenge or review, otherwise, it ceases to be knowledge.

Austria, and the rest of Western Europe where similar laws have been implemented, should take care to remember that it was not because hate speech was permitted that the Holocaust occurrred. It was because free speech was not. It was because voices were not allowed to speak out in defense of the victims of the Nazis. It was because the people were not allowed to hear evidence against the claims of the Nazis. The Nazis came to power because the German people did not notice the erosion of their liberty. The answer to a bad argument is not to ban it, but to refute it.

In the past few days we have seen what the desire to enforce orthodox beliefs can lead to. How can Western society ask the cartoon protestors to respect freedom of conscience while putting a man on trial for exercising his?

"It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush (1803)

UPDATE - Irving was sentenced to three years in prison. Incredible. In an effort meant to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening again, the government of Austria has acted like the Nazis whom this law is designed to stop. Whenever thought is criminalized, an injustice has been committed.

Pentagon warned of potential abuse two years before Abu Ghraib scandal

Via Washington Post

The Navy's former general counsel warned Pentagon officials two years before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that circumventing international agreements on torture and detainees' treatment would invite abuse, according to a published report.

Legal theories granting the president the right to authorize abuse in spite of the Geneva conventions were unlawful, dangerous and erroneous, Alberto J. Mora advised officials in a secret memo. The 22-page document was obtained by The New Yorker for a story in its Feb. 27 issue.

Quote of the day

"It is setting a high value upon our opinions, to roast men alive on account of them." - Montaigne

"Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain"

Killing over cartoons.

Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people in the deadliest confrontation yet in the whirlwind of Muslim anger over the drawings.

It was the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa's most populous nation. An Associated Press reporter saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.

What God that approves of death and violence committed because of a cartoon is worthy of the name "God"? Were these actions to be defended upon anything other than faith based fanatacism, there would be absolutely no rational justification for them. Can an infinite God be harmed by a cartoon? No. Then what is the problem? The problem is this: the orthodox are afraid someone might change their mind. That is it; freethought, to them is intolerable, as evidenced by the most despicable law of Islam, the one that makes apostasy punishable by death. Its a terrible, horrible, inhumane law. In fact, it is possibly the most cruel and malicious law ever created. It is a law designed to destroy a person's most valued possesion: their mind. It is a law designed to lock people into an internal mental prison where they are shackled by the bounds of orthodox beliefs. If a person can not live according to the dicates of their conscience, if they can not be free to think what thoughts they are compelled to think, then a person becomes a slave to their own beliefs and loses any true sense of autonomy. Is there anything more wicked than giving us freewill only that we would suffer eternal torture for using it? What a strange "gift." As Joseph Conrad once said, "all a man can betray is his conscience."

Any man who would deny another religious liberty is a hypocrite, because it is taken for granted that he expects religious freedom for himself.

The slow death of a free press

Image from Media Reform Information Center







From Media Channel

U.S. communications regulators should quickly relax ownership restrictions on the radio and broadcast television industry, Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on communications, said on Thursday.

Upton, a Michigan Republican, cited the proliferation of broadcast stations, cable, satellite television and radio and the Internet as evidence that consumers have sufficient choices to justify allowing companies to own more outlets.

"Common sense tells us that this explosion of media sources should eliminate any concern over a lack of diversity of views in the marketplace and competition," Upton said in a speech to the Media Institute.

"This growth (in sources) remains unabated and more than makes the case for regulatory relief in the broadcast sector," he said. Upton sent letters to U.S. Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin last week urging quick action.

Make no mistake, if these regulations are eased, the monopolization of the press will only accelerate. And when the means of disseminating information becomes consolidated in the hands of the few, democracy dies.

Some Founding Fathers discuss the Bush administration decision to bypass the FISA courts and its theory of a unitary executive

James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Alexander Hamilton: "Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."

"[I]t is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power."

Thomas Paine: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."

James Madison: "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

John Adams: "[L]iberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right ... to knowledge ... and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."

George Washington: "It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield"

John Adams: "There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

Thomas Jefferson: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."

James Madison: "Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."

George Washington: "Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

Thomas Jefferson: "Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny"

James Madison: "[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of [the] noblest characteristics of the late Revolution."